


Marvel of Mankind

by morphogenesis



Category: Nabari no Ou
Genre: Canon - Manga, Families of Choice, Gen, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:07:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphogenesis/pseuds/morphogenesis
Summary: The long road to rebuilding the Shimizu clan, one step at a time.Or, "The Hanging Garden" redux.
Relationships: Meguro Gau/Shimizu Raikou, Shimizu Raikou & Shimizu Raimei
Comments: 42
Kudos: 8





	1. Like I'll never be the same

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2021 and I am...returning to Nabari???
> 
> Almost 11 years ago now I tried to write a little fic called “The Hanging Garden,” which was this idea. Manga canon and I'm running off of a quick reread and memories of scanslation choices so: girl, it's fuckin' Kairoshuu. Thanks to my friends who put up with my main communication about Nabari being me linking them random panels of RaiGau and yelling, “I HATE THEM SO MUCH.”

For the umpteenth time, Gau wonders what’s on Raikou’s mind. Raikou’s staring out the bus window on their way to the Shimizu land, and playing with the ends of his hair like he expects it to be longer. He cut it himself and it looks good; it always does when he does his hair.

Gau has been writing idly on the ride. Ideas for what to do next, based on what Raikou’s mumbled half-asleep or said while walking down a side street. There are so many little moving parts to a great whole: construction loans and breaking ground and recruitment. Wow, how do they deal with people in their two-person bubble for the first time in years? How will he feel when other people are looking to Raikou and there’s a necessary distance between them—

Gau shakes his head; can’t worry about selfish things like that when Raikou needs him.

Raikou notices him staring and raises an eyebrow at him, to which Gau smiles, silently saying everything is fine. Raikou nods and resumes looking out the window. Gau returns to his notes, having jotted down a series of bullets of his research so far into how to get a loan. It doesn’t really help that they’ve never needed credit and Kairoshuu provided their housing, so Raikou has no credit history and Gau is too young to get a loan (despite the fact that he would definitely do a good job with one).

But they need a home someday, he thinks. The kind of place Raikou can be proud of and lead from, and the kind of place they can host a clan in, a family. Family. Gau smiles at his notes, pressing down hard on the paper with his ballpoint pen.

Before they came to Banten for the party, they met Raimei back here, where the Shimizu home once stood, and the three of them went over the property, the siblings discussing their home as they remembered it and Gau taking his notes, drawing designs per their descriptions in vague gestures and memories with varying degrees of detail. Sometimes they didn’t agree and in those moments Gau would nod along and split the difference, drawing a blend of both ideas. 

Give Gau a month and a library and he’ll figure out how to do this, he swears. For Raikou, for Raimei, for himself.

For they’ve had the discussion, the part where Raikou as usual beckons him with one arm and pushes him away with the other, saying he understands if Gau wants to go back to school and leave him to this.

“This is our dream,” Gau told him, and still tells him. “I’m not leaving your side.” And besides, they’re still traitors to Iga and he doesn’t think it’s a great idea to leave Raikou’s side, even if he wanted to. He does miss school, but it’s been so long and his life is so different now it doesn’t matter anymore.

The bus rolls on underneath them.

**

Raikou is a Fuuma descendant and could stay there if he wanted to, like Raimei, but he has no desire to. He’s not been a friend to anyone for a long time,ex-Shimizu then ex-Kairoshuu, and he doesn’t feel right around those people. And with the chaos following Kotaro and figuring out who is still loyal to his cause, Saraba has her hands full as the new Chief. He doesn’t want to impose.

So they return to their tent (which has definitely fallen on them once already and that was definitely not Raikou’s fault). He half-listens to Gau as he goes over his ideas so far, and then Raikou closes his eyes.

“Raikou-san?”

“Hm?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Sure.”

Happy with that answer, Gau continues with something about credit and finances. Raikou tunes it out as he doesn’t find it interesting. He thinks about the earliest days, when they felt much younger and Gau would sit in silence in front of him, just watching him do mundane things like eat or maintain Shirogamon. Stunned in his presence, in awe of him. Maybe frightened of him.

Raikou likes it better without the silence.

_”Are you alright?” Raikou asks him when they have sat in total silence for an hour, as he putters occasionally but Gau does nothing but watch him._

_“Yes, Shimizu-sa—”_

_“Raikou,” he says harder than he means to. “Call me Raikou.”_

_“Okay, Raikou-san!” He nods. “You can call me Gau! Please.”_

_“Alright, Gau.”_

Gau cooks, but he doesn’t serve himself, instead offering it to Raikou and then sitting there, returning to his work. When Gau is preoccupied he forgets to eat, and Raikou’s watched him be absorbed many times before in creating dossiers, writing reports, cleaning, preparing for any anticipated need of Raikou’s.

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Oh, no, I’m not—”

“Eat,” he pushes, holding his bowl out to Gau.

Gau looks surprised, before taking it hesitantly. “Thank you.” He eats, muttering something about his dish needing more salt, and Raikou just watches him. He supposes he is hungry, but hungrier still for something that nobody can give him but himself.

**

Raimei is sparring with her brother, a series of aikido tosses and flips across the ground that Gau can’t begin to follow. Raikou has a superficial upper hand, the kind meant for an older student instructing a younger peer rather than a real fight, but he takes a tumble or two himself. The ground is hard but they hit it relentlessly, made of something other than flesh, communicating in the best way they know how.

When they’ve exhausted each other, Raimei looks to Gau. “Your turn!” she calls brightly.

Raikou laughs, fond. “Gau doesn’t do that, Raimei.”

“Well why not?” she says, springing from foot to foot as if she hasn’t just been thrown to the ground a half-dozen times. “Shouldn’t Gau-san know how to defend himself?”

“I defend Gau,” Raikou says, a little offended at the implication.

Gau has tried this. Once. And gave up after taking his own half-dozen hits to the floor, padded as it was. He decided quickly it was not for him and that it was better to let Raikou do the fighting.

“Oh, oh, Raikou didn’t take it easy on you, did he?” she says. “I won’t either!”

Gau holds up his hands, defenseless if she wants to try. “I-I’m really fine, Raimei-san.”

“Raimei, leave him alone.”

“Fine, fine, be big babies,” she chides, turning towards the tent.

Raikou, ever mature, makes a face behind his sister’s back. Gau titters and Raimei spins around, asking what Raikou just did.

This is what Gau wanted for them. Brother and sister, together again.

“What are you smiling about?” Raikou asks as if he knows.

“Nothing,” he says.

**

It rains for two days straight, until the tent practically sags under the collected water. Gau fusses; Raikou tunes it out, as is their way. Raimei is staying in Fuuma Village, the vestige of civilization here.

“We need a home,” Gau says, looking up at the top overhead.

“We need a guarantor,” Raikou replies, without looking up from his fashion magazine. They’ve been quiet recently and there’s something about absence and the heart that applies lately that never did before. It’s probably the tiny living quarters and general difficulty of keeping things clean.

“Would Yukimi-san do it?”

Raikou considers it. “I don’t see why not.”

So they end up at Yukimi’s new apartment, with his black cat rubbing against Gau’s leg. A second cat, a tortoiseshell, has apparently joined the household and Gau wonders if this is a sign of a growing problem of Yukimi’s. 

After their ask, Yukimi’s first response is, “No.”

“Please Yukimi—”

“You two screwed me last time!” If Gau remembers correctly, it was Yukimi’s name on the paperwork for their last apartment, before they abandoned it alongside Kairoshuu.

Raikou rubs the back of his head and gives a disarming smile that always works on Gau but is fifty-fifty with others. “We had a very good reason, Yukimi-senpai.”

“Don’t ‘senpai’ me, Raikou.”

“What else am I supposed to call you?” he asks innocently.

Gau, seeing they’re going nowhere, bows at the waist though doing so to Yukimi makes him feel ill. “Please. This is the first step towards our dream. We won’t let you down this time.” He won’t let Raikou let him down, mostly.

Yukimi thinks about it and then shrugs with his one arm. “If Tenpa doesn’t call me for a month.” The second cat rubs against his calf and Yukimi bends down to scoop it up.

“What does that mean—!?” Gau exclaims, and then Raikou slaps a hand over his mouth, pressing down so hard Gau feels it against his teeth.

“We have a deal, Yukimi-senpai.”

The first thing Gau does in their new apartment is push the window open to air it out; it smells musty but it was the best they could do between their budget and Yukimi’s. Their surface world jobs don’t go that far. All of their things fit into backpacks and a box or two. It’s close enough they can get to the property if they want to and far enough that nobody from Iga will be particularly interested in hunting them down. He wonders if anyone is; he hopes they aren’t.

He takes the longest bath of his life. When they sleep, their futons are at best several feet apart. At that distance he can smell Raikou’s shampoo, floral, and he remembers being pressed close to him while facing Kasa, and the same smell was there, comforting even in the chaos.

It’s silly, but he’s had a few dreams that Raikou was carrying him like that again, close enough to feel him breathe and supported by his strong arms. Now he’s distracted with the thought again, rolling onto his side to face Raikou, who’s facing him as well. His eyes are open and Gau gets the distinct feeling he was being watched. Their eyes meet and they hold the contact for a long moment, before Raikou looks away.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

He rolls over to face away from Gau.

‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Gau wonders. He needs Raikou and Raikou needs him. ‘We were Wakachi, we are a duo.’ Does Raikou still really think he wants to be anywhere else?

**

Raikou takes his time washing his face. He woke up in the middle of the night again with an unsettled feeling, a panic that something was wrong but he didn’t know what. Looking around, he sees the window and door are closed, Gau is safely asleep. Nothing appears to be amiss.

He runs the water over his wrist, turns it up hot until his skin reddens. He doesn’t feel the pain that should be there, his mind wandering elsewhere despite his attempts to keep it still. That he can’t do this, that he’ll drag Gau and Raimei down with him, that he can’t keep the balance all by himself, he can’t even keep himself in harmony.

They still only have one cell phone, have never needed two as they’re always together. He takes it from Gau’s bag and sits on the bathroom floor, searching the contacts for a number.

Yukimi is wide awake. “Tenpa, do you want me to take back the—”

“It’s me.”

“Why do you sound like someone died?”

Raikou ignores the question and answers it with his own. “Do you remember when I joined Kairoshuu?”

“Yeah. You were the weird kid who never talked, just smiled at me like an idiot. You did your job, though, so I couldn’t complain. I remember Kazuho warmed you up a bit.”

She did, with free sushi.

“I think the real change came when you saved Gau. Even though I didn’t meet him for a while, I remember you started talking more, like you were more confident.”

“Really?”

“It was probably from having a friend.” Yukimi yawns. “Did you need something or did you just want to chat, because that can—”

“Am I a fool for doing this?” All of it, though saying it aloud is too large for a word of it to get past his throat.

“We’re all fools doing our best, now shut up and go to sleep.” Yukimi hangs up without further explanation. 

Raikou rubs the soft spot under his eye, feeling a headache coming on and a keen burning on his wrist. He’s finally tired.

When he goes back to bed, Gau is talking in his sleep, something about a shopping list. Gau denies he does this but on more than one occasion Raikou’s woken up to it, freezing as he thinks it’s someone else in the room.

He listens to it for a while, and then lays down again, falling asleep to comforting chatter to nobody.

**

Gau can’t help but pay attention, and to seek. He seeks information about the greater Nabari world and what’s going on. Iga is predictably in chaos, Fuuma is more controlled chaos but still chaos, Togakushi and Koga see an opportunity. The internal politics of the Nabari world are something that always interested him, and now he needs to know as much as he can, to keep an eye on the balance between the Nabari and surface worlds.

He reads, he stays up until his eyes hurt, and he starts writing. Journals, reports, and most importantly letters. He writes to key figures in the Nabari world, he writes to ancillary figures, he writes to administrative assistants and random people whose contact information he can get his hands on. Some of them write back, replying to his pleasantries with their own, asking their own questions in turn. Gau gives them an abbreviated version: he’s with the Shimizu family, you know the history.

The ones who are surprised and intrigued keep writing back, and so does Gau in turn.

“What are you always writing for?” Raikou asks him one night, leaning over his shoulder to see. 

Gau hurries to cover his paper. “Just to a friend. Um, from school.” He did have a few acqauntainces in high school, before he disappeared. Raikou has encouraged him to return, but his life feels so out of turn now that it never feels like the right time.

“Oh. I see.” Raikou seems satisfied by the answer and goes back to cleaning Shirogamon.

Gau feels guilty but deems it all necessary; Raikou will understand if it ever becomes relevant. Until then it’s his little quest, his way of staying useful and keeping his mind active. He feels Raikou would deem this interference, but it’s no different from when they were Wakachi, Gau reasons.

**

The season changes and as the summer heat creeps in, cicadas calling, Raikou leans into it. Last summer he was still Kairoshuu, Wakachi, working alongside Gau and now he’s Shimizu, head of a family of three, planning for a completely different future. To rebuild what he destroyed.

He’s sitting by the window, shirt off because the heat is stifling and their air conditioner only occasionally works, and watching people pass by on the street outside. So many ordinary lives, he remembers watching people and wondering what it would be like to be born a surface-worlder, like Gau. To not be inculcated from birth with a sense for suspicion and bloodshed.

Gau returns, carrying grocery bags, and when he notices Raikou he talks about the landlord’s carelessness and tenant rights and other things, and Raikou waves him off.

They’re in stasis; working their surface world jobs by day and talking idly by night, but it’s all just dreams right now with no capital and no time. He’s not sure why he’s rushing, but he wants what they had back, that which was his, that which he threw away.

Gau is here, steady as a rainshower, and he cooks them dinner with practiced routine and they eat on the floor as they never did bother to buy more than spare furniture.

“I miss Raimei-san,” Gau says as an opener. “She’s so vibrant.”

Raikou does miss his sister, misses her like he misses an old friend he doesn’t see often. She’s busy with school and monitoring the situation in Fuuma. He nods and agrees they should invite her back; she’s on vacation now after all.

Raimei arrives with a thunderstorm, the scent of rain on the wind that chases her inside. “Raikou! Gau-san!” she says, addressing the wrong name to each person before theatrically realizing her mistake. Her hair is limp and she leaves to dry it quickly before emerging with a braid over one shoulder.

They review the information she brings and then switch to happier topics, a distraction from the seriousness of their business. Raikou and Raimei end up seated on the floor, their hands entangled in a game of Cat’s Cradle like they were children. He remembers wowing her with his shapes, with what he could spin out of seemingly little string. She was so easy to please back then, so brilliant and uncomplicated in her innocence. 

Their hands touch as they twine the string tighter and tighter, and neither pulls away immediately.

The power goes out as they try to disentangle their hands; Gau lights candles and they sit in a circle, talking. Raimei reports what she knows about the Fuuma, and the trio discuss what to do with it all.

As the two look at him, Raikou realizes with surprise they’re looking _to_ him for his instructions. He’s still not used to that.

“So,” he says, “we’ll leave them up to their business, but be prepared for the worst.”

“What’s the worst?” Raimei asks.

“...Something that would affect the surface world, of course.”

“This doesn’t feel right,” Raimei says, arms folded. “If we cut it off at the head—”

“It’s not our business anymore how the Nabari world conducts itself,” he says, harder. “That’s—” An order? Instructions? How did Mom manage to sound so authoritative and confident? “That’s my thought,” he settles for.

Raimei still looks unsatisfied, but she’s quiet for once, just looking at him. When the rain lets up, she gestures to Raikou to step outside, with an apologetic look at Gau. Once outside, they lean against the wall of the building, facing outward without looking at each other. The weather appears to have driven everyone else inside, and only a lone pedestrian crosses the street below.

“I don’t like it, but I’ll do it,” Raimei says. “The Fuuma were really kind to me after—um, everything. And it doesn’t feel right just watching them struggle, but—but I’m a Shimizu and—”

“You don’t have to be happy about it, Raimei. Just commit to it.”

“My conviction is mine,” she says, firmer. “I’m by your side now first and foremost.” She shrugs, smiling like it’s easy to do for her. “Miharu doesn’t need me anymore.”

“I’m sure he does,” Raikou says. “He’s one of your closest friends.”

“Since when did you know who my friends are?” Raimei teases back, elbowing him. He elbows her back. This, they understand.

“Thank you for being here,” he says.

“This is about my honor and pride,” Raimei says softly, barely audible above the increasing rain. “Just like yours.”

‘This is about my reason for living,’ Raikou thinks, looking sidelong at her. This is why he carried on, this is why he has to.

To Raimei, he says, “You’re correct.”

**

Gau returns to school with hope and reluctance all at once. It’s necessary, like his letters, like his job, if he wants to be of use in the Shimizu clan, he argues. And besides that, maybe Raikou wants the apartment to himself sometimes. It’s the least Gau can do.

He’s able to return to his old year, though in a different school. The first day back is gray and his stomach hurts like it did when his mother dropped him off at kindergarten for the first time. Gau’s satisfactorily on-track with math but feels illiterate in Modern Japanese. So many new kanji to learn, though he’s up for the challenge. Social Studies class is boring. He knows more than a lot of his classmates from years of paying attention to politics for Nabari world reasons.

He first hears a murmur towards the end of the day, that there’s some weird guy by the school gates. Peering out the window, he can just make out a fair head, the ends of his growing-out hair dip-dyed an oceanic blue and green. He didn’t know Raikou wanted to change his hair so drastically. 

As Gau approaches, he can see Raikou is playing with something in his hands as he leans against the gatepost, ignoring the people parting around him.

“Raikou-san? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“It was slow, they let me go early,” he says, holding out the item. It’s an omamori, this time marked for success in academics. “I forgot to give you this.”

Raikou did not come all this way to give him a charm, but Gau doesn’t care. He feels good that Raikou’s seeing him in _his_ element. “Thank you! I like your hair, by the way.”

Raikou turns, assuming (rightly) that Gau will follow him. “How was school?”

They chat about nothing as they walk to the train, stop at the market, and then return home. The sun’s setting by the time Gau sits down with his homework, sighing over sentence structure and characters and numbers. Raikou stands over his shoulder at one point and offers his opinions; Gau delicately tries to tell him calculus doesn’t work that way and Raikou only scoffs.

When Gau’s done he breaks out his stationary set and tries to focus on letter writing. There’s a particular spy he’s got a bead on, and keeping in touch is essential. At one point he doesn’t notice his head has bowed and he’s falling asleep until Raikou shakes him.

“Go to bed,” he says.

“In a minute.” Because there’s no real time to stop working; this job, protecting Raikou and building their clan’s capital, is his most important, and harder than school. He’s still working on that loan; slowly, finally they’ve started putting money away, though the process is slower now since he had to drop hours at his job.

Raikou shakes him again, his hands tightening on Gau’s shoulders. “Now.”

There’s that feeling again, that distraction and alertness whenever Raikou touches him. Warmth, but not just warmth from body heat. Raikou has touched him before, plenty of times, but it’s only recently Gau’s started to notice it, to feel differently about it in a way he can’t explain. He reaches back and puts a hand over Raikou’s, covering it.

“Thanks, Raikou-san. Of course.”

The hands grip him before Raikou lets go, turning his rough hand palm-up to brush against Gau’s for a moment as he pulls away.

**

Raikou leaves for work before Gau wakes up, which is a feat considering Gau’s early hours and legendary tolerance for sleep deprivation. Raikou doesn’t have to be at work this early, he just needs the walk. He’s restless, something positive for once as it’s telling him to get up, get out, and make this new life happen.

New life. So different from his old life. The only commonality is Raimei and Gau, who used to represent two different lives he led, and are now friends. He’s noticed them texting each other casually. Sometimes he checks the phone for the weather and finds a picture of an interesting-looking dog that Raimei saw, or Gau’s cooking.

The midsummer air is still hot even though it’s dark outside, and he doesn’t want sweat down his brow but it seems inevitable. Blue and green are slightly hardier than pink in terms of hair color but he doesn’t want it to fade if he doesn’t have to.

With his fair hair partially restored, he looks so much like Mom. Without it, he resembles a person who may as well be a stranger now. Raimei says he looks better with his (semi) natural color but, well, she’s always been biased.

He stops at an overpass, leaning against the railing and digging the toe of his shoe into the concrete. The dawn has come by the time he’s stopped walking. So many people with a place to go, he thinks.

And now he has one too.


	2. Waste my time dreaming of being alive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covers my face. you guys are really really nice, that is all. word counts are gonna be all over the place, sorry in advance. also lmao chapters 1 and 2 take their titles from "of all the gin joints" by fall out boy.

Pain has a different definition to a samurai, Gau thinks. Gau has watched Raikou get run through with Shirogamon and still claw at the concrete trying to get back on his feet. Raikou’s been hit in the face hard enough to break his eye socket and arrived at work the next morning with the skin around his eye blooming like a dark flower. He can sprain an ankle and walk two miles on it.

Which is why Gau is surprised when he comes home from school and finds Raikou on the floor, a washcloth over his eyes and the curtains pulled shut to block out light. He hisses a sharp ‘shh,’ when Gau asks if he’s alright, so Gau just refills the water glass beside Raikou and leaves him alone, so Gau can do his homework

Night has fallen before Raikou finally sits up.

“Are you hungry?” Gau asks.

He shakes his head, in fact covering his mouth at the thought, eyes squeezing shut.

Gau turns over the paper he was writing on and gets up to take a canister of protein powder off the top of the fridge, mixing a scoop with water and returning the glass to Raikou to substitute for food. He doesn’t like it when Raikou doesn’t eat, but it can’t be helped if he’s sick. 

They’re quiet for a while before Raikou asks him if he’s not going to eat himself; Gau shrugs. The heat is sluggish and he’s too focused on what he’s doing to stop and cook. 

Raikou goes to the toilet and over the sound of running water Gau can hear retching. He frowns. Raikou returns as if everything is fine and a moment later Gau feels something bounce off of his head; Raikou has thrown an energy bar at him. Knowing an order when he sees it, Gau eats.

“I’m going for a walk,” Raikou says as he fiddles with his sandals at the front of the apartment; his little head tilt in Gau’s direction announces, ‘Come with me.’

The night feels better than the day; it’s autumn now and Gau tries to remember what he was doing this time last year, before remembering suddenly that he was comatose. Right around this time last year is when…

He looks sidelong at Raikou, who is staring straight ahead as they walk down the street. He’s touching his neck, approximately in the same spot where, though Gau can’t remember that night now, Shirogamon sliced through the joining of neck and shoulder, through him instead of Raimei. He could’ve done without the bedsore, but he’s glad it happened the way that it did.

They walk with no particular direction, just outrunning the night.

‘What’s on your mind?’ Gau thinks as he keeps pace a few steps behind Raikou now. ‘Would you tell me if you knew?’

“Raikou-san,” he says finally. “I have to work tomorrow, but then I thought we could…” He just wants to spend time with him, mostly. Their schedule is a slurry of work, school, and sleep right now, and there’s still Nabari matters undealt with. He can’t think of the right way to explain what he’s been up to, or the information he has, that will make Raikou understand he only wants what’s best, but he can’t sit on it forever. That would be irresponsible, and one thing Gau is not is irresponsible.

“Alright,” Raikou says, agreeing without obviously having heard him.

Gau stops walking; Raikou walks ahead a short bit before realizing Gau’s no longer following and turns back to him. Gau palms the spot over his own neck, right where the scar begins under his shirt. “That night… It was about my conviction, too, y’know.”

“Hm?”

“It was my choice to stand there between you and Raimei-san.”

“Do you presume to know everything then?”

“Yes,” Gau says, “when it comes to you.” He smiles.

Raikou doesn’t return it, but looks like he could.

**

Raimei returns unexpectedly, already being in their apartment when they arrive home from a cafe. “Hi!” she says, like it’s normal that she broke their lock and made her way inside. It’s the way of shinboi, Gau thinks, not of samurai, but the Shimizus have never been graceful and what is he going to do, judge her for something he’s done himself?

“What on Earth are you doing, Raimei?” Raikou says, resigned.

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” she asks lightly, hands behind her back. “Did you forget it’s your birthday?” She reveals what she’s been hiding: a cake in a clear plastic shopping bag, with blotchy pink icing. Gau wonders if she made it herself. Gau is touched but also oddly jealous, seeing as how _he_ is the one who makes Raikou a cake every year (barring last year when he was comatose), but he can’t be rude either.

Raikou makes his way to her and ruffles her hair, to her annoyance. “Thank you. Let’s eat.”

Raimei’s cake has an unpleasant aftertaste, almost soapy, so Gau’s cake comes out of the fridge anyway. Chocolate and coffee, inadvertently matching Raimei’s inexplicable raspberry and mint combination. Raikou doesn’t like his birthday but he does love his sister, so he’s smiling and laughing at her animated retelling of her adventures in Fuuma. The two segue into a story from their childhood about an eventful birthday Raimei had that ended in playful disaster and the siblings covered in dirt and scaring their father half to death. They interrupt each other to correct misremembered details and joke about whose fault it was.

Raimei looks to Gau. “What did Raikou do on his birthdays without me?” she asks hesitantly, as if she’s being nice, but he knows Raimei has no use for subtlety.

“Oh, um, work mostly. We were busy in Kairoshuu.” He looks to Raikou, who agrees with a nod.

“But there’s one birthday of Gau’s I remember…” Raikou begins, a smile laced with soft sadism on his face as he begins what Gau knows is perhaps one of his own most embarrassing moments ever. 

“Raikou-san, don’t--!” he complains, but he knows it’s no use.

Raimei is surprised, disgusted, and then laughing at Gau’s expense, apologizing for it. “It’s just…” She wipes a tear from her eye and then falls quiet. “I’m really glad my brother had you. Thank you.”

He still has Gau, he thinks, wondering, worrying that she’s implying she expects them to distance themselves in the future, before shaking his head to clear it. He’s being silly again, panicking about something that won’t happen. Raimei knows where they stand. Where they all stand, as she’s part of the clan too and working just as hard as they are to make their dream happen.

He recalls building fires with her and catching fish, back when she stayed with them for those months after they first left Kairoshuu. There was a simplicity to it all, learning each other and watching the siblings fall, aching and slow, into old routines. He was happy for them and even the scarcity and uncertainty of those days couldn’t bring them down.

Raimei is the first to bring it up, when Raikou has excused himself to use the restroom. “So...this place is pretty small,” she says, uncertain. Then, as she does everything, she dives in with her real question, bowing her head: “Can I move in with you two?!”

“Huh?”

“It’s just...I think the clan should be together, like we used to be. And I don’t feel comfortable with the Fuuma anymore,” she admits. “It feels wrong to take their hospitality while doing nothing to help them, and I know if I stay I’ll do something I shouldn’t.” She looks distracted and torn, before saying, “I want this to work more than anything. I can’t risk it.”

“Raikou-san asked you to--”

“I know what Raikou said! And I feel bad letting him down, but…” She rubs her upper arm. “It’s just what I think is right for me. So please.”

Gau thinks before saying, “I don’t have a problem with it myself.” He, feeling much like an older brother for a moment, pats her shoulder. “I’ll help you talk to Raikou-san.”

“Raikou has an opinion too, y’know,” they hear from behind them, and both turn. Raikou stands there with folded arms and a stern expression fixed on Raimei. “Gau is right. I did ask you to keep an eye on the Fuuma.”

“How much did you hear?” Raimei asks.

“Oh, everything,” he hums, before returning to the table. It lists to one side as they bought it very, very used, but it works for their purposes. “What about school?”

“I’ll transfer! And I’ll go back to Fuuma Village every weekend if I have to. I promise I won’t abandon my mission.” Raimei slaps her hands down on the table, making it wobble. “Please, Raikou,” she says, out of reasons. She probably acted off the cuff, but her passion carries her through life and once she has an idea she doesn’t let go of it. Gau can relate to it.

“Raikou-san,” Gau starts, fixing him with a level stare. “I… I respect your decisions as head of the clan. But consider Raimei-san’s feelings too.” That’s all he has, but he spoke honestly. “She’s your sister.”

And Raikou misses her, misses living with her and their easy camaraderie. Gau has seen it in the way he wants to call Raimei first with every new idea he has for the clan, the way he wistfully describes growing up with her, speaking more about his childhood in a few months than he did in the years before.

Gau likes to think he knows Raikou, and he knows when he’s hiding his real feelings. He has tells: he closes his eyes, plays with his hair, and stays quiet for a moment too long. “Do you promise?” Raikou finally says.

Raimei, in the way of all little sisters, knows when she’s about to get her way, and smiles. “Yes.”

“Then welcome home.”


	3. I’ve got headaches and bad luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gau and raimei acting like siblings also, pry it from my stubborn hands
> 
> chapter title is also fob kjngfkg
> 
> it's a slow build but it's going somewhere i swear

Six months pass without Raikou fully aware of it. He and Gau work, Gau and Raimei go to school, the three of them track the progress of the Nabari world. It’s not good, and then one day it explodes.

The Nabari world goes back to war. And the three of them prepare to intervene in case it spills over into the surface world. Raikou and Raimei train and Gau supports them and writes and writes, things he doesn’t explain to Raikou when he couldn’t shut up about them before.

Raikou isn’t stupid and Gau is far too transparent in his actions. Raikou has seen who the letters are addressed to and the sheer volume of them. He had hoped, at first, that Gau would be forthright enough to tell him, and then the longer it dragged on the less confident Raikou was in confronting him. Just what is Gau thinking? Usually, Raikou knows. The last time he didn’t, Gau ended up in a coma.

He has no time or energy for a dramatic confrontation. Instead he feels like he gives Gau a dozen chances to tell the truth, and still nothing. Gau continues writing.

Gau brings them news of a Nabari world criminal using his spy network to extort surface worlders. He’s already substantiated it himself, as he always tries to. He looks between them with a plaintive expression.

“How do you know this?” Raikou says, words weighted by knowledge. Beside him, Raimei tilts her head.

Gau worries his lip, something he doesn’t know that he does when he’s hiding something. Then he goes to a small box on his writing table, tilts it over, and before the siblings two dozen letters spill out, a dramatic flourish (and disorganization) unlike him.

“Because I talk to people,” he says. “Neutrality doesn’t mean we should stay ignorant of the world around us, and I thought—”

“You did this all by yourself?” Raimei asks.

“Yes.” Gau looks so ready to admonish himself.

“That’s amazing! What else do you know?”

She and Gau continue talking, while Raikou watches them, arms folded. What else didn’t he—doesn’t he know? About Gau, about Raimei, about them all. Some head of the family.

“We’ll talk about this later,” he says coolly. “For now we should worry about what we’ll do next.”

“We go punish them, right?” Raimei flexes her arm. “Easy.”

Raikou says, “That’s right.”

That’s how they end up stalking a lone stranger at night, through back streets on quiet feet. Raikou has long since settled into the goal-oriented mindset he enters whenever he has to kill; the goal is to incapacitate and pass judgment, as it ever is. Raimei is on his right side, Gau slightly behind them, holding on to his black book. He and Raikou have done this with a third person before, usually Yukimi, who knows how to keep up with their rhythm. Raimei is so focused on their target that she bumps into Raikou, and the two have a silent scuffle like siblings do before Gau taps his shoulder with his book.

“Enough of this?” Raimei whispers to Raikou, and he, measuring the outcome, nods. She barks, “Todo Masahiro!” 

When Todo turns, seeing two samurai and a third person, he straightens up and then runs. People run sometimes; Raikou can run faster and longer. Raimei and Gau follow his lead, and they manage to corner him in an alley.

Gau opens his book to the right page, begins with the man’s name, and reads off his list of proven crimes. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he finishes with. Gau is a person of propriety even when being an accomplice.

“Fuck you.” Todo loses a significant amount of confidence when the other two raise their swords.

“We of the Shimizu clan have come to judge you,” Raimei says, determined.

“Shimizus? Aren’t they dead?”

A dull ache starts behind Raikou’s heart; he shoves it down. He gets an idea. Without giving a signal to Raimei, he moves, in the other man’s space before he can blink and slashing down and across with his sword. The blade slices cleanly through his knee, and judging by the way he collapses, Rakou’s successfully severed the tendon. It takes a moment to hit him, and then Todo screams, clutching his bloodied, useless knee that spreads out beneath him like clumsily butchered meat.

“Then tell the Nabari world we’re alive and well,” Raikou says, and then levels his sword with his throat. “And if I have to come back for you, I’m taking your life, not just your knee.” He holds up a hand when he hears someone approaching behind him.

“Raikou?” Raimei asks, confused. “Don’t we have to—”

“This too is judgment,” is all he says before turning his back on Todo, gesturing for Raimei and Gau to follow him, which they do. What he does not say is he has no idea if he just did the right thing, that he has no idea why he let his ego get in the way like that.

“Raikou-san?” Gau asks, at his left side, and the look Raikou levels at him must kill any protest.

“He’s not going to stop,” Raimei mutters. “We’ll just have to come back.”

“Maybe so,” he acknowledges. “But now we have a messenger.” He looks at Gau again, who looks down at his hands. “Don’t we?”

**

“I didn’t want to lie to you,” Gau says quietly, turning a page in his book, where he scribbled some notes about what they’ve done tonight. “I just...thought you wouldn’t like it at first. I thought I’d find a better way to tell you.”

“It comes dangerously close to influencing the Nabari world, Gau. I don’t like it.”

“I’m not making anyone do anything. I just ask people to tell me what they hear.” He looks down at his notebook again, feeling embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop if that’s what you want.” That’s a year’s work gone, then, and a lot of relationships he’ll have to abandon. It’s a useful tool, he wants to say. You needed it, he wants to say.

Raikou is thinking; Gau can see it in the way his eyes dart around the room, looking everywhere except at Gau. In the bathroom, Raimei is singing something to herself loud enough to be heard in the living area. “Don’t lie to me again,” Raikou says, stern. Then, reluctantly, “But it was useful tonight.” He holds his elbow, the same arm that slashed Shirogamon through Todo.

“How did your mother get her information? I’ll do that,” Gau offers.

“I have no idea,” Raikou says darkly. “I have no idea how my mother did anything.” It’s a stark admission, and the bitterness of it buries his tongue for he’s silent even at Gau’s next question about what they’ll do next. He shakes his head and turns away from Gau. Gau clutches his book, wishing it was Raikou’s shoulder. Wishes he could reach Raikou right now.

Raikou leaves the following morning before Raimei and Gau are awake, and he doesn’t return until long after evening has come. He doesn’t say what he was doing. He’s done this before, but usually he’s open with Gau of all people. He’s taking off his shoes when Gau says, “Um, Raikou-san… Are you hungry?” he offers because it’s all he can.

“No, I ate. Thank you.” Raikou focuses on his shoes as if they’re fascinating.

He definitely didn’t eat a balanced meal, Gau thinks. It’s still awkward; he feels like he tripped a wire he shouldn’t have, with that question about Raikou’s late mother. ‘Come on,’ he thinks, watching Raikou. ‘Tell me not to worry about you. Throw something at me. React.’

Raikou does nothing.

**

Raikou lives with his head below water for several days. Around him swirl his thoughts, swirl Raimei and Gau’s curious looks and small talk, but he can’t see clearly. It has been so easy, too easy for him to pass judgment in the past. Why not now? Why was his announcement so important?

What would Mom have done? She’s not around to ask, though he doesn’t need to. She would’ve killed that man.

He and Raimei are waiting for a train when she asks him, “What’s wrong with you?” 

He’s surprised it took her so long. “Nothing.”

“Liar.” She frowns. “Don’t punish Gau-san with silence.”

“I’m not punishing Gau.” He’s not intending to anyway; how Gau takes it, he can’t control. “I’m just…”

“Just what?”

The train rolls up, interrupting their conversation. They ride without talking to each other even though they have to stand so close their sides are pressed together. Raimei accidentally elbows him in the face at one point. (She also kicks in her sleep, and kicking her back does not work.)

“Gau-san really cares about you,” she says on the walk back to the apartment. “He has to be worried about you. If you can’t talk to me, talk to him.”

‘I want to talk to you,’ he thinks, ‘but would you hear me?’ Raimei is still proud of the Shimizu name and Raikou only wants to be. He can’t tell her that.

He thinks of the letters and how Gau manages to be proud of it, doing something for himself and for the clan. He’s pleased. And he’s earned it. 

All at once, Raikou knows what to say to him.

There’s nowhere for Raimei to go in the apartment to give them privacy, so she drops her bag off and leaves, saying she needs the walk. The two are alone and looking at each other from across the room.

“I…” Gau begins, and falls silent when Raikou holds up a hand.

And then Raikou freezes. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Finally, he gets out, “I need help.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t be angry about the letters, because you’re right. We need them. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Raikou-san—”

“I can’t do this by myself,” he admits, voice straining. The hardest thing is to be honest with himself. In this way, he and Gau are utterly different people.

Gau is quiet for a moment, before he rubs his arm. “Look at me.” Raikou does and sees his face is tender despite the anger. “I’ve bet everything on you,” Gau says. He sniffs. “I _can’t_ lead for you. But I can help you.” He steps forward and reaches for him, stopping his hand halfway there. “You have two people who want to help you, so let us.” He laughs, a soft sound. “And you know if you want it, I’ll make it happen.”

Raikou digs his nails into his palm to distract himself. In that moment, he wants something he can’t ask Gau for. He just cares about Gau and Gau cares about him and that has to be enough.

“Ah, you have something…” Gau trails off, reaching up and plucking something from Raikou’s hair, smoothing it down in one motion. He brushes Raikou’s ear when he does. “There.”

‘Why are you so kind to me?’ Raikou thinks, but it’s a fruitless question. Because it’s Gau. That’s who he is. He knows no other way to be. ‘It’s not fair,’ he thinks with a small smile. Gau notices and returns it, assuming everything is going to be okay because they’re together.

**

It’s been way too long since they’ve been to Banten, so they go. Raimei immediately plows into Miharu when they meet, hugging his neck, and his smile is calm and pleased. The two are arm-in-arm as they walk ahead of Raikou and Gau. Gau’s arms are laden with a cake he made for the occasion; he didn’t want to be rude and arrive with nothing, after all.

Miharu leads them to Hanabusa’s house instead of his own, and she greets them with hugs in turn. Raikou looks confused when he gets one, and Gau realizes that outside of their usual touching he doesn’t know when Raikou last got an intentional hug.

There’s no talk of the Nabari world, no conflict, no worrying today. It feels nice. Kumohira keeps to himself but stops to eat with them, putting up with needling from Miharu and Raimei with good humor.

Raimei announces, to Miharu’s surprise, she’s spending the night with him and though Hanabusa offers Raikou and Gau her spare futons they two get up to leave.

“The Nabari world awaits,” Raikou says, the first mention of it all day, terminally not caring about reading the air.

Raimei, Miharu, and Kumohira accompany them to the bus stop, and before they leave Kumohira makes a vague proclamation to be careful. He probably feels he has to as the unofficial leader of Banten, a village of one now. Raimei is gone and Miharu has turned his back on the Nabari world completely and, well, they all know what happened to Kouichi and Shijima. He did not respond to Gau’s attempts to contact him, when he first started writing. As far as Gau knows, Banten is staying out of the current conflict.

“Of course. Raikou-san’s here, after all,” Gau says, looking to Raikou. Raikou nods at him and touches his hand briefly.

“What do you think he meant?” Raikou asks him later on the bus, his head leaning against the window. His eyes are half-lidded. Gau realizes that he doesn’t remember Raikou sleeping through the night recently. Gau will wake up at odd hours to use the bathroom or get a glass of water and Raikou is awake, playing a mobile game or reading a magazine in the half-light.

“Probably what he said, Raikou-san. He must worry about Raimei-san too. She was his student, after all.”

“I see. And what do you think we’re doing?”

Gau kicks one foot up and over his knee. “Our best.” He pats Raikou’s knee and to his surprise the other takes his hand, squeezing it for a long moment before letting him go. Gau thinks that from the outside people must see their relationship as one-sided, with Gau needing Raikou, but he thinks it’s obvious that Raikou needs him too.

Gau pulls his notebook out of his bag and starts to doodle a house.

**

Winter comes and with it Gau’s favorite weather: snow. Raikou doesn’t have an opinion but he does like seeing Gau happy, and he likes throwing a snowball down his shirt. He likes it less when Raimei does the same thing to him.

They’re in their apartment when Raikou first has the guts to ask:

“What about university?” Raikou says. It’s getting close to the time for Gau to graduate, and Raikou realizes he has no idea what Gau’s plans are. He hasn’t noticed Gau studying for entrance exams, instead just doing his homework, working, and writing like he has been for a year now. Honestly, a few years including his work in Kairoshuu.

“Oh, there’s no time for that,” Gau says dismissively without looking away from the window. He’s watching the snow fall. He starts when Raikou comes up behind him and shakes him gently, though maybe Raikou’s definition of gentle is different as Gau’s head bounces. “I’d rather be with you.”

“You can go somewhere close,” Raikou tries. “You’re intelligent. You should go.” What he doesn’t say is, ‘You’ve already done so much for me.’

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” Raikou says honestly. “But you should be happy.”

“I’m happy with you,” Gau says gently, turning his head.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you can’t do it,” Raikou challenges.

Gau turns, holding his arm with a pinched expression. “I know I can, it’s not about that.” He reaches up and squeezes Raikou’s shoulder. “There’s nothing I want more than to be by your side. You promised to be where I could always see you. Well, I promise you the same thing.”

‘I know you’re not lying,’ Raikou thinks. But he doesn’t know why he can’t accept that answer.

**

“Unsanitary,” Gau can’t help but mutter as he wipes the blood off of Raimei’s face. He’s wearing a glove to do so. She’s perfectly capable of doing it herself but he doesn’t want her to have any more literal blood on her hands than she already does.

Around them is a trio of dead men; he’s just watched Raikou and Raimei kill them. Nabari world criminals leaking over into the surface world again, upsetting the balance. Raikou uses a handkerchief Gau gave him to clean Shirogamon before he sheathes it.

Gau thinks that with her passion and skill, Raimei would’ve made an excellent Wakachi. He doesn’t know if she’d be offended by that admission. For now, she just shakes her head and says, “I’m fine, Gau-san.”

“You don’t know what bloodborne illnesses can do,” Gau chides, like he never does Raikou. There’s something about Raimei that, though she’s an extremely capable samurai, makes Gau want to look after her. Blame it on him never having a sibling, he thinks.

The air is freezing and every exhale is visible in airborne frost. He doesn’t know if Raimei has killed before tonight. He sees her shiver and assumes it’s the weather. Gau calls a neutral acquaintance of his to come and make the bodies disappear. Another benefit of making friends everywhere, letter by letter.

Their walk home is quiet as their tracking was earlier. Raimei’s presence crafted a new rhythm for them, one Gau appreciates as together they work so fluid and easy. Their work is slow but it’s efficient when they do have something to do. It feels good to be doing something concrete, instead of discussing possibilities and telling old stories of another life.

He’s at Raikou’s elbow when he notices it: Raikou has a cut on his face from where a bullet grazed him. Without thinking Gau retrieves a clean handkerchief and wipes at the blood welling up from the cut. Raikou looks at him, surprised, and Gau says, matter of fact, “Your face is dirty.”

Raikou chuffs. “Are you my mother?”

‘Well, someone has to look out for you,’ Gau protests in his head. He never used to do that before, but ever since Raikou’s naked admission that he needed Gau and Raimei, Gau has felt oddly protective of Raikou. Moreso than usual, anyway. Possibly because he knows Raikou isn’t likely to protect himself, outside of a life-or-death situation.

“Sorry,” Gau says, laughing self-consciously. “I can’t abide a mess, you know?”

“I know, Gau,” Raikou says, familiar and fond.


	4. You think the remedy for pain is always more pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Yves Olade, from “Symptom."
> 
> IF RAIKOU BEING PHYSICALLY HARMED UPSETS YOU, UM??? Tread carefully. Emeto warning also. I can say "Slow Burn" but I will always melt before it gets to that point.

They revisit Shimizu land that spring, after a long winter full of longing and questions. After walking it and seeing it’s much the same, Raikou throws his sister a practice sword and they dive into training. They fight again and again, and when Raimei firmly drives her fist into his torso he collapses, winded. They have to be ready, but he wasn’t for that.

Gau clearly has a favorite, and goes to Raikou’s side, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay, Raikou-san?”

“Fine,” Raikou gets out. He gets back on his feet in spite of Raimei’s smugness. “Again,” he tells her.

“If you say so,” she says, squaring up with him again. They clash, again and again, until they’ve exhausted each other. To be ready for anything, any battle, he thinks. His hair is coming out of its ponytail and he shakes his head, trying to keep it out of his face. Raimei looks perfectly composed, and a tiny bit smug. As her older brother, Raikou can’t have that, so he attacks again.

By the time they’re truly out of it, collapsed on the ground, they’re elated.

“Sometimes I don’t understand you two,” Gau says, nonjudgmental as he offers Raimei a hand up first. She accepts it and gets back on her feet, shaky.

“You don’t have to,” she says, chipper, and claps his shoulder so hard he winces.

They’re just burning off excess energy before they go to the bank tomorrow, Raikou thinks. This is the week they approach someone for The Loan, the thing that will allow them to rebuild their home, and Raikou can barely swallow his excitement.

The next thing he knows is he’s squeezing one wrist in front of the other, sitting before a loan officer. He’s scared he’s going to sweat through his suit jacket. Gau is beside him, talking the most despite being too young to legally take one out (not that they’ve said anything about that). They aren’t ignorant to the obstacles and still they won’t stop until they have what they want.

“It’s been our dream for a long time,” Gau imploring, knitting his fingers together over his chest. “Please, look at my plan and see how serious we are about this.” He gestures to his notebook and some carefully-detailed printouts of his plans for construction and repayment spread out on the desk. It’s the product of many discussions and many long nights on his end. It’s their yearning made physical.

Raikou squeezes his hands over his knees, looking the officer in the eyes. “We want nothing more,” he says, earnest in a way he hasn’t been in a long time.

They obtain it, though not as much as they’re asking for. That’s fine, they can start small, and he knows for a fact Gau can make almost any amount of money work. Outside of the bank, Raikou lifts Gau off the ground in an embrace, impulsive and happy, and Gau presses his cheek against Raikou’s. They’ve done it.

And now begins the process of shopping for contractors, something Gau throws himself into, comparing completed projects with his own blueprints, narrowing and narrowing who will make the most acceptable recreation of the old Shimizu home. The Shimizu siblings offer their input when asked, and even when they conflict Gau manages to mediate between them to find the best possible outcome.

When they approach one, Raikou opens his mouth but finds himself stumbling over the right words; Gau can read his mind and says exactly what they want, and they secure a deal. Raikou squeezes himself outside of their office, feeling ecstatic and not believing it all at once, and Gau touches him, gentle as he ever is, and the two are all but grinning at each other.

**

Watching the ground breaking fills Gau with conflicting emotions; hoping that Raikou is happy, anxiety, teary eyes, pride. Something is being dug up so something new can be built. And he did this.

Over the next slow year he watches the frame go up. It’s smaller than they wanted it to be, but they could only secure so much money and Gau did his best to argue for more. Raikou isn’t complaining though, and neither is Raimei. Instead they talk animatedly amongst each other about what it reminds them of: the garden their father used to keep, their mother’s study, the yard they would spar in. Their energy carries them through their days and Gau copies them.

Life goes on, and they’re still together through the months, as their home slowly comes together and Gau writes himself sick and the two Shimizus spar and hunt and watch. Sometimes he feels like he never stops writing, but it’s worth it for their smiles.

The final walkthrough of their home, he notices Raimei covering her face with her hands, tears squeezing out over her fingers, and Raikou, noticing, puts a hand on her head.

“It’s okay, Raimei,” he says quietly, and she lets out a lone, quiet sob, her feelings ever on her sleeve.

The siblings have come home. It’s not just like what they lost, but it’s similar enough to evoke their feelings. Gau swears he catches Raikou bowing his head at one point, but he quickly shakes it off.

They’re moving their things into their new home on the first night when he notices Raikou again, looking quietly lost when he deposits everything of his into what’s just his bedroom now. He and Gau have their own spaces for the first time in...ever. They haven’t slept apart in years, and at night Gau stares at the ceiling overhead, so foreign to him. Outside it’s raining softly and he at first doesn’t hear the footsteps outside, then he does hear the door sliding open.

Raikou looks lost in the doorway, leaning to one side, holding a pillow at his side and his futon under his other arm, his smile apologetic.

“Come inside,” Gau says softly, and without a word Raikou drags his futon inside, setting it up a few feet away from him like usual. He lies facing Gau and closes his eyes like he’s hiding something. They don’t sleep apart for the first month. The one night they try again, Gau ends up knocking on Raikou’s door.

There was a time where Gau couldn’t fall asleep before Raikou, back when they first met each other. He felt eternally in Raikou’s way and he didn’t feel less like that until the second time Raikou defended him from an attacker, Shirogamon in between Gau and the assailant before he could blink, Raikou’s face dark and challenging. That night he slept very soundly.

A storm has rolled in and the rain patters softly against the roof; Gau lies awake and knows Raikou is as well. The turmoil rolls softly between them and he thinks about rolling over to face him, but he doesn’t. Neither does Raikou.

**

Raikou swears he _feels_ Gau take the hit, as the assailant rips into his stomach from where he’s thrown himself, again, between Raimei and an attack. Instead of pained, Gau looks surprised, and then he collapses.

“Gau-san!” Raimei calls, catching him before he falls to the ground with one arm and raising her sword with the other. She doesn’t have to attack; Raikou, with a yell, cuts him down from behind, slicing his back open like it’s paper. Rage takes over and he cuts him again, before realizing he’s breathing too hard, arms exhausted, and the person beneath him is flayed.

Raimei has Gau on the ground, pressing down on his stomach with both hands, and Raikou’s hands shake as he dials an emergency number. Gau being hurt always makes him feel small, like a failure, like it’s his fault, which it is, really, it’s his job to protect Gau.

In the hospital Raimei nods off, arms folded, at his bedside, and Raikou notices a poorly-wrapped cut on her palm. He nudges her and she shakes her head, not worried for herself.

Gau is awake and mumbling something, mouth molded around and blood full of morphine, when Raikou reaches out and takes his hand. Raimei puts her hand over Raikou’s and the two of them hold on to him. Then she slaps his shoulder and says, “Stop doing that!”

He guesses they really are family, now.

Gau’s recovery takes place over that entire spring, and the Shimizus stumble through the bulk of the chores, not realizing exactly how much he did until they have to do it themselves. (Raikou, tired of his sister’s jokes, one day points out that he _did_ take care of himself, all by himself, when he first joined Kairoshuu, but Raimei just laughed and asked, disbelieving, “How?”)

The hardest part, after the guilt, is that Gau is too stubborn to ask him for help. Raikou has caught him trying to lift baskets of laundry and do chores and despite his best efforts Raikou can’t get him to stop. 

“Relax,” he says as he holds Gau’s notebook over his head, aware Gau can’t lift his arm high enough to grab it right now or stand on tiptoe.

“That _is_ how I relax!” He’s scowling, an expression Raikou isn’t used to seeing fixed on him, and finally Gau gets out, “Give it back, Raikou-san!” Something about his face, his demeanor, his plaintive voice, makes something inside of Raikou melt, feeling lightheaded, and before he realizes he’s lowering his arms. Gau snatches his book back and walks off, muttering something.

Raikou is still trying to understand what happened a few minutes later, rubbing his arm and wondering why he’s so distracted now. Gau looked appealing that way, he thinks. Raikou covers his face with one hand, feeling that he’s hot. ‘Oh, what a fine mess,’ he thinks.

**

They’re sitting on the veranda, just Gau and Raikou, looking at the stars. There are so many of them out here; this is what Raikou grew up with, he thinks. He likes seeing this bit of him. 

Raimei is asleep, and they’re talking about little events and stories from the Kairoshuu days, something Raikou doesn’t like discussing in front of Raimei still. They’re joking, even; it wasn’t all bad times, no matter how it ended.

“Oh, I remember that apartment,” Raikou says, covering his eyes. “It was always freezing.”

“And then we got roaches,” Gau says, still shuddering at the memory. He hugs himself, feeling the unusually cold autumn evening. Raikou’s birthday was a few days ago and his one selfish request was to go out for drinks with Yukimi and Gau had tried not to feel, well, extremely jealous. He’s just a hair under twenty and soon he can finally be the adult he’s felt like for years.

Raikou notices him shiver and makes a, “Hm,” noise when Gau says he’s fine. Then he takes off his jacket (lime green and pink and definitely only something Raikou could make look good) and puts it over Gau’s shoulders. “There.”

“Thank you,” Gau says, pulling it tighter around him. Wishing it was an embrace.

**

Raikou gets the flu—chills, vomiting, fever, the works. Gau holds Raikou’s hair the first time he throws up, and though Gau can handle blood, vomit makes him want to throw up himself.

“You can go,” Raikou rasps when he’s done, rubbing his throat. “I’m fine.”

“You are not,” Gau says before thinking, rubbing Raikou’s shoulder. “I’ll stay right here.” It feels nice to take care of a helpless Raikou; Gau gets to comfort him and make him hot soup and rub his back when his body aches. After a few days, Raikou starts to recover and Gau is almost sad that this tender time is coming to an end.

Raikou drags himself out of bed to attend a meeting Gau is called to by one of his associates. Gau has continued his relationships throughout the Nabari world, and now he’d say he has several close friends and a network of acquaintances that keep him informed of goings-on. He has to make appearances sometimes as a courtesy, and he knows this man: a Nabari world weapons dealer, one who prides himself on never putting surface-worlders at risk and behaving with a code of honor. He likes Go and he and Gau have played several times through correspondence.

They arrive at a nondescript office, Raikou doing his best to stand tall, his weakness showing only through the way his hands shake when he adjusts Shirogamon at his side. The one they meet with isn’t the man Gau is expecting; instead one of his subordinates. He offers them tea and light fare and Gau is biting into a macaron when he feels Raikou tense up beside him.

Before Gau can process, he’s thrown to the floor and pinned, someone pressing their knee into the small of his back. He hears a scuffle, and knowing Raikou is armed he doesn’t fear a thing because he’ll get them out—

When he hears a groan and someone hitting the floor, he turns his head to see Raikou on the floor himself, disarmed and someone kneeling on his back. He was both taken by surprise and weakened from his illness, Gau realizes with shock, his best efforts right now are substantially less than if he were at peak health and strength. Raikou struggles and tries to free his arm, growling and reaching for Shirogamon that someone, taunting, is holding just out of his reach.

“Let go of him!” Gau cries. “If your problem is with me, it’s with me!”

“Shimizus killed my sworn brother,” the leader says, dark and hateful. “Isn’t he the same to you?”

Gau flips through his mental Rolodex, trying to remember who from this group they may have killed. He can think, vaguely, of one, the man who sliced Gau open not too long ago. A man who was using his infiltration skills to break into homes and rob and assault civilians. He had to be judged, Gau wants to argue, but his every word has to be used for fighting for their lives right now.

“He is! If you know how it feels, don’t do this!”

“Make that one scream,” the leader orders with a careless lift of his shoulder, and then one person steps on Raikou’s outstretched hand while the other stomps on his elbow, forcing it to bend in a way it shouldn’t. The snap is like a gunshot. His scream is muffled by the floor, but it’s still _so_ loud, so pained. Gau, with panic, is reminded of their confrontation with the Kira-user.

“Raikou-san! Please, stop this!”

“I’m not as honorable as you Shimizus,” the leader taunts. “You kill quickly with that precious sword; I’ll kill you slowly with it.” He waves a hand and someone unsheathes Shirogamon; the other drags Raikou’s head up by his hair so the sword-wielder can put the blade of Shirogamon to his exposed, vulnerable neck.

Gau can’t look away from him; when their eyes meet, he sees Raikou’s are pleading with him to live, even though he fears for his own life.

‘But you have to live, too,’ Gau thinks.

And then he gets an idea.

“Your boss is waiting for me!” Gau says, turning his head to look up at the leader. “If I die, he’s going to have questions for you. How is he going to feel when he finds out you killed me? What is he going to do to you?”

He sees the other man hesitate as a possibility that hasn’t crossed his mind before settles over him. Then he sighs. “Let that one up.”

Gau gets to his feet frantically, reaching inside his shirt. He wraps his fist around what he’s hiding inside, and then says, “Let him go.”

“Or what?”

Gau pulls the kunai out and holds it to his neck, and then he presses down, determined, drawing a line down his neck. He doesn’t feel his pain, he feels Raikou’s. “Because if he dies, I die. This is tipped with poison, and I’m the only one who knows what it is, so good luck trying to save me. I won’t tell you unless you let him live.”

Panic blooms on the leader’s face, and he looks to his own men. “Let him up.”

They do and, weakened, Raikou rolls onto his side with a groan, dragging himself upwards with his good arm. He stands up slowly, still in pain.

“And the sword,” Gau orders.

The man holding Shirogamon throws it and its sheath to the ground, and Raikou retrieves it slowly. He makes eye contact with Gau.

All Gau says is, “Go,” and Raikou springs like a feral animal.

When all is said and done, dead men surround them and their blood covers Raikou and, to a lesser extent, Gau, and still they’re embracing, Gau’s face pressed to Raikou’s neck. He is crying so hard that snot is running over his upper lip and he can’t stop. He almost lost Raikou. He can’t stop thinking about that. He’s been there before and every single time he felt like his entire world was dying.

“Ssh,” Raikou soothes him. “What was the poison?”

“I lied,” Gau says, sniffing.

“Brilliant,” Raikou says simply, and kisses the top of his head, hand in his hair.

What happens after is a blur of getting Raikou to a hospital, treatment, and not speaking about what just happened. Gau washes his face and then Raikou’s, lingering over his eyes and mouth, murmuring, “You should take a bath,” and Raikou just nods, adrenaline gone and exhaustion here to stay.

Raimei arrives in a bluster, demanding of a nurse in the hallway to tell her where her family is, and when she storms in she sees Raikou and, despite her samurai bearing, loses what remains of her composure. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she protests. “I should’ve been there.” She hugs her brother’s neck and Raikou leans his head on her shoulder.

“I’m fine,” he lies.

Gau has lost the ability to cry over this, rationalizing that Raikou needs him to be strong. They talk about what just happened and decompress, and when Raikou falls asleep Raimei says, “You really should’ve told me.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“I’m a member of this clan, too.”

“I’m so sorry, Raimei-san,” Gau says, voice stuttering over the words. “I did my best.”

Raimei sits beside him and puts her arm over his shoulders, never afraid of physical contact. “You two are so stupid. In a lot of ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“When are you going to tell Raikou you have feelings for him?”

Gau chokes, and Raimei smiles at him.

“Anyone with eyes can see it,” she says.

Gau does not like to think he’s so obvious, but he is honest and he’s not surprised Raimei has seen it, with as much time as she’s spent with them.

“Tell him” she urges. “You might be surprised.”

Gau stammers and covers his face with his hands, caught.


	5. This too, I think, is a symptom

Over the next few days after coming out of the hospital, Raikou tells himself two things:

One, he is so over having his arm broken. Both bones in the forearm were snapped by that boot crashing down on him, and he did not miss the sling. It’s hard to brush his hair with his non-dominant arm (and he knows Gau would do it if he only asked, but Raikou _likes_ to do his own hair, thank you). If he had to vote though, the Kira-user’s attack was still worse, if only for the sensation of being completely out of control of part of his body.

Two, he should’ve known the meeting was a trap. The last-minute change in host, the unusually large number of guests to attend to two people, the fact that it’s the Nabari world and nothing is as it seems... It’s so obvious in hindsight, he of all people should’ve known. Not to insult Gau’s intellect, but it’s Raikou’s job to protect him, while he networks and plans and wins the war with careful, strategic movements, precise down to the way he folds laundry.

So Raikou waits, and he waits, and still, frustratingly, Gau doesn’t blame him or act like he does. Even when the cut he gave himself on his neck gets infected and he goes to the doctor, who says it will scar. Even when looking worried over Raikou, eyes lingering on his arm.

‘Don’t do that,’ Raikou thinks. ‘I’m fine. This is nothing. You know this is nothing.’

Still.

One night. Gau itches at the edge of his clean bandage, frowning at something in his notebook. He crosses a line through an item with a sharp motion. He’s been working nonstop, falling asleep sitting up at his table, waving off the siblings’ attempts to distract him.

“Why don’t you lay down?” Raikou asks him, good arm beneath his head as he lies on his futon in what they’ve basically admitted is their room, not Gau’s anymore.

“Oh, I’m fine, Raikou-san,” he says, dismissing it without looking up. Not out of disrespect but probably an affectation, hiding tiredness.

Raikou wishes he had something good within reach to throw at him. He settles for Gau’s pillow, which doesn’t bounce off of him as satisfying as something hard would.

Gau stops writing and looks at him. “What, is that an order?” he says, laughing with uncertainty. There was a time he’d say ‘Yes, Raikou-san,’ and that would be the end of discussion. It happened bit by bit over years, but he’s grown bolder, more playful, quicker to bite back, albeit with blunter teeth than Raikou’s. 

Raikou crosses his good arm underneath his bad. “Yes, as the head of the family I’m ordering you to go to sleep.”

“That’s an interesting use of your authority,” Gau observes, amused, but after a long moment closes his notebook, using a piece of calligraphy paper as a bookmark. He dresses for bed and yawns as if the act finally triggered his tiredness. He lays down and in the quiet it’s only breathing until he says, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Is your arm hurting at all? The doctor said we should—”

“Gau. You can stop.” Usually he doesn’t have to outright say it; giving Gau a tap on the head suffices. “I’m not so fragile that you need to worry about this,” he says, gesturing to his broken arm. He wants to say more but can’t find the words.

Gau lets out a soft, affectionate sound. “That’s not how this works. I know you’re fine, but…”

“But?”

“It’s you, so I can’t help it.” A rustling sound. “I’m sorry.” Again. He’s said it a handful of times since then and Raikou’s always shaken him, metaphorically or the one time he could grab him, literally. It was a trap. They walked into it. A rational person might say that at best it was both of their faults.

Raikou closes his eyes and settles into bed. He feels Gau awake beside him until he passes out himself.

**

Gau has a dream: he’s having tea with his mother, in a tearoom she never lived to see (but Gau went there with Raikou once). It’s her baking that covers the table; the tastes are as warm, sweet, and creamy he remembers. He can never get his baked goods to taste the same; he’s tried for years, working off of memories from when he was too small to see over the counter.

Mom reaches out and touches his hair, smoothing down a lock that will just stick back up anyway. “Gau.”

“Mom?” It’s been so long since he’s dreamt about her that he’s not sure he’s remembering her face correctly. Were her eyes always so dark and her hair so wild, like his? Dream logic tells him of course they were, that this is reality and normal and routine. In this, he can see her perfectly. When awake he can’t see her at all.

Gau thinks of everything he’s ever wanted to tell her, and everything he can’t say out loud. He’s fighting for the right words, and it must show on his face, for Mom frowns at him, concerned.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know if I’ve made you proud,” he says, eyes tightening. “I’m trying to make up for what I’ve done, but it seems like the harder I work the more mistakes I make, and now—” He swallows. “Someone I love got hurt because of me.”

“Is that so?” Mom looks him over, finger to her lips. She’d make the same gesture whenever she didn’t know what to say to him. She was always so careful to treat him like he was mature, because it was just the two of them. ‘We’re good company,’ she’d say, and kiss his forehead even though he hated it at the time. “Do they know? That you love them?”

Gau thinks of Raikou, wounded and pained and a second away from violence, first looking to Gau to see if he was okay. All Gau had to say was ‘Go,’ because he knows the other’s heart so well. He thinks of every act he’s ever done for Raikou, tiny at the time but adding up to a great whole. “I think so.”

“If you’re sure, then I think they already forgive you. Nobody can stay mad at you, Gau.” Her smile is the warm and friendly one he remembers. “Do you think they love you back?”

“Mom!”

“Tell me!” She giggles. He was never too old for her to tease.

Gau thinks of Raikou, covered in blood and holding him, kissing the top of his head after making sure he’s okay. He wonders if all these years Raikou was just waiting for him to speak first. “Yes.”

Mom closes her eyes and sighs like she’s about to reveal a great secret of the universe, the kind that, to a child, all parents seem to hold. “So instead of saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ say, ‘I care about you. Be with me.’ I’m sure they’ll understand.”

He tries to laugh. “You’re my mom, you’re telling me what I want to hear.”

Mom reaches across the table and takes his hand, the first touch from her he’s felt in years. She looks on him, full of sadness and love. “Honey, I tell you what you’re afraid to hear.”

**

When Gau wakes up, Raikou isn’t in his bed. Gau sits up, wondering where he went because he never drifts far away. It’s not like there’s anywhere to go, not like when they lived in the city. Normally he would drop it but with the dream still fresh in his mind, he fears if he doesn’t say anything now, he won’t say it at all, ever.

He exits the room, ghosting outside. He likes the night without dozens of ambient lights drowning out the stars. While passing Raimei’s room he can hear her awake and moving inside. He makes a mental note to see if she needs anything when he’s returning to bed. 

He finds Raikou sitting on the ground around the side of the house, cross-legged, arm braced against his stomach, looking upward. Gau doesn’t have to call his name; Raikou senses his presence and looks over his shoulder, confused.

“Didn’t you tell me to sleep?” Gau jokes.

“So why aren’t you?” he replies, patting the spot beside him.

Gau sits cross-legged beside him so their knees touch. “Can we talk about what happened?”

“Alright.”

The thrust of both of their arguments are the same: “It was my fault.” Only the reasoning differs: Gau because he led them there, Raikou because he, ever up for self-recrimination, feels he should’ve known better. After their discussion peters out, they stare up at the stars.

Gau says, “Are we really arguing over who gets to take the blame?” When he looks to Raikou, he finds Raikou looking right back at him.

Raikou rubs his cheek with his good hand. “I think we are.”

Gau can’t help it: he starts to laugh, a hysterical peal at first that becomes a lower, huskier tone, until he has tears in his eyes, then rolling down his face. He wipes his eyes and then feels rather than hears Raikou laughing as well, a silent but unmistakable shaking of his shoulders as he covers his mouth. 

When they’re done (which takes a long while as every time one of them tries to speak the other starts to laugh about it again), Gau looks at him again, noticing Raikou looking back into his eyes, smiling the kind of gentle smile that says, ‘I trust you.’ And then Gau looks down at Raikou’s mouth, noticing it as if for the first time. Then he thinks of all the other times he’s noticed that mouth.

Raikou stills like a caught bird, a moment before it realizes it’s trapped.

Gau leans up and catches that mouth with his own, chasing Raikou when he at first pulls away. Feeling lovesick, feeling foolish, he still kisses him. To think that they could’ve been doing this for years makes him more desperate, and press harder.

And then he feels Raikou pressing back, following his lead for once, and they kiss until they’re sick, like they’ve eaten too many syrupy sweets. Raikou’s hand is in his hair, running through it, gentling, and Gau breaks away to say, “Stop that,” and Raikou just laughs.

“You can take it back,” Raikou says at one point, gentle and as if hoping for rejection.

“No!” Gau says, a little too loud for the night. He’s actually angry that it took so long when it was so obvious. He starts to say more, babbling, but Raikou thumps him on the head twice like he’s fixing the signal on an antenna TV and Gau quiets.

“Good,” Raikou says, the kindness he’ll allow himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Yves Olade, from “Symptom."
> 
>  **me:** i wrote all the gay shit but i should add more plot to this chapter  
>  **best friend:** no you don't have to


	6. Faster on fire

The words for what Raikou feels are ‘delirious happiness.’ For years, he believed that Gau didn’t feel the same way, and that it wasn’t his right to ask for it or to tell him how he feels. He would tell himself that he asked for too much already. It’s one of the few times he’s happy to have been proven wrong. His one regret, besides the fact that it took so long, is that he had to break his arm to prove his devotion, because he can’t hold Gau as tightly one-armed.

As his arm heals over the coming weeks, Raikou gets used to holding the weight of a sword again, to play-tussling with Raimei again, and, a novelty to him, to holding Gau’s hand with his own.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” Gau asks him as they’re walking home, Raikou tugging him along a little too fast, and for a brief moment he worries that Gau means holding said hands before realizing he’s referring to their next plan. They’re to infiltrate a meeting between villages in order to monitor the progress of conflicts in the Nabari world. Well, no, he never knows if he’s having a good idea but it can’t be a horrible one if Gau didn’t immediately, if gently, shoot it down.

For Gau’s letters point to the situation in the Nabari world being bad, and when the conflicts escalate there the shinobi become desperate and sneaky and slip into the surface world to launder and steal money, trade weapons, and anything else to get ahead over another village. Without the Shinrabansho he really did think things would calm down eventually, but the vacuum it left has only opened up more room for pointless conflict. _Really?_ is all Raikou can say.

Not that he hasn’t contributed to that recently. Gau’s relationship with the dealer whose subordinates who tried to kill them, and who Raikou killed in turn, has soured since the whole incident.

“Be honest with yourselves,” the man had said during their ‘clearing the air’ meeting, addressing Gau, unable to even look at Raikou. “Does the world even need the Shimizu clan anymore?”

That had hit Raikou like a blade under his ribs, sinking in, grinding against bone, piercing his organs, his core.

“Of course they do,” Gau argued. Before he could go on, Raikou put a hand over his mouth.

“He’s entitled to his opinion, Gau,” he’d said amiably, with a smile directed at the man. “But we believe you do. After all, did you not fail to see this deception right under your own nose?”

The man finally looked at Raikou and scoffed. “I was doing just fine until you showed up and killed one of my men’s brothers. What else was he supposed to do?” He folded his hands over his stomach. “It’s funny how your policy of neutrality only applies when it’s other people getting hurt.”

“It’s the best way to protect the balance.”

“The balance was managing just fine until you showed up again. The world doesn’t need more self-righteous hypocrites, Shimizu.” He looked to Gau again; Raikou finally removed the hand over his mouth, feeling Gau had been trying to speak for some time. “You’re a good guy, Meguro. You’re going to make a lot of enemies if you stay with him.”

Yeah. And wasn’t that the problem. It was never too far from Raikou’s mind.

“He’s always kept me safe,” Gau said, holding one arm and eyes narrowed at the implied criticism of Raikou.

“Then I hope your gamble on him pays off.” The man crossed his arms. “Now get out of my office. Don’t ask me for anything again.”

So they’d left his office distracted, perturbed. As a child, Raikou knew in broad strokes that the Shimizus weren’t always popular, but they’d at least been accepted under his mother’s leadership. Now how to rebuild that reputation with his own, which was already not great. The people who did know of him either knew him as a traitor to his own blood or to Kairoshuu. He admired how Gau carried himself when confronted about it, in his writings or in-person: ‘Yes, I was a Wakachi. Yes, I abandoned my post. What of it? It was the right thing to do.’ And as if inspired by his strength and force of belief in himself, people came around to him, and Raikou by proxy. But it still wasn’t enough.

When they get home, Raimei is attacking the plot they’ve cleared for a garden with a hoe, determined if not entirely knowledgable about what she’s doing. None of them are; gardening is a new art to all of them, Gau’s dogged research into topsoil and pH and nutrients aside. But they wanted a garden, like the one Dad used to keep, and so they’ll make one, vegetables and perennials together.

Raimei’s reaction to the Raikou-and-Gau announcement (it was less of a formal announcement and more that she walked in on them kissing, mortifying them far more than she) was to exclaim, “Finally!” and walk off shaking her head. And to her credit, she hasn’t treated them differently since then, except to be a little bit louder about announcing her presence as she moves around the house.

Raimei looks up when he calls her name, wiping sweat from her brow. “Yeah?”

“We’re late.”

“Whose fault is that?” he hears her mutter as he opens the door to his study. It looks more like a storage room for everything they don’t have room for, but if he calls it his study then it is one. Raikou doesn’t know if three people can be called a meeting, but if he says it it’s law, something else he isn’t used to. They sit around the table. They discuss.

It’s a normal enough evening, he supposes, if boring.

**

He and Gau went to sleep curled up, hands on backs and in hair, kissing until they stilled, and they woke up still entwined. And that’s all well and romantic, but now Raikou’s arm is dead asleep and he’s had to pee for twenty minutes, but he’s stuck. He was just sort of hoping Gau would wake up and spare him an awkward situation, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So, reluctant, he gently pushes Gau off of him, making him stir and mumble, rolling onto his stomach. He’s still that way when Raikou returns, even when Raikou nudges him with his foot.

Raikou kneels and rolls him over, pinching his cheek and shaking it until he moans, “Raikou-san…”

“Good morning,” he says.

“Mmph.” Gau tries to turn his head back into the pillow and Raikou shakes him harder.

“Wake up, there’s work to do.” That’s Gau’s siren song, and sure enough he opens his eyes again, turning, bleary, to Raikou.

They get dressed, straighten each other’s collars and smooth down hems, and then head outside where Raimei is practicing with her sword. She was always a diligent child when it came to the sword or aikido. It’s served her well; Raikou is proud of her.

“You’re dragging your left foot,” Raikou calls.

“Am not,” she says, growing annoyance in her face.

He can see it clearly; it was one of the reasons he was able to defeat her so soundly, her emotional turmoil aside, during their first confrontation when they reunited. She fractured her ankle when she was young and she’s favored it slightly ever since.

“I’ll show you how to do it correctly,” he teases, and Raimei pretends she’s going to throw her sword at him.

“Your roots are showing!” she fires back, and Raikou, offended, touches his scalp, wondering if she’s right. His hair is auburn right now, and while he’s not a big fan of natural colors he likes this one well enough. He chose it because he thought it might help his credibility a bit.

“Just a little bit,” Gau agrees when Raikou looks to him for his opinion. Seeing Raikou is displeased, he adds, “But it still looks nice! It’ll be under a wig today anyway!”

A few minutes later Raikou’s parked Raimei on the veranda, pins in his mouth because it’s easiest for him to just braid her bountiful hair back and pin it up. Raimei talks and he mumbles around the pins until his mouth is free again.

“You’re really good at this,” she says. “How?”

“I taught myself,” he says. “I prefer nobody touches my hair, so I do everything myself.” For a brief moment he did have hair long enough to put into a small braid, and then someone grabbed it during a fight and punched him in the face, spraining his nose, and he realized it was a bit of a foolish idea. If it’s never been an issue for Raimei, well, perhaps she’s been lucky.

“I thought Gau would do that for you,” she muses. “He does everything else.”

“Oh, stop,” he says lightly, tucking her braid up and pinning it close to her scalp so it will lay flat under the wig. He doesn’t know when Gau and Raimei dropped honorifics with each other; he’s still ‘Raikou-san’ after all.

“Hey, Raikou?”

“Hm?”

“Gau told me what that guy said. He’s wrong. The world does need us.” She tilts her head and he taps her shoulder to indicate she’ll ruin his work. “I knew that back when I thought I was the only Shimizu left.” She rolls her shoulders and doesn’t look at him. “So don’t listen to anyone else. I believe in you.”

“Thank you, Raimei.”

**

His advice to Raimei boiled down to ‘Be quiet,’ when she asked him how they were going to behave during the meeting. It was a Town Hall-style, with representatives and curious spectators both. The siblings sit in the far corner of the room and try not to look suspicious. After ten minutes it’s become obvious there’s more tension in the air than is being stated, and another five and Raimei tugs on his hand, nodding to someone at the front pulling out a weapon.

Chaos follows, and at one point Raimei pushes between him and another attacking him, assuming they’re part of the opponents. Her sword catches the brunt of the impact and, like they practiced, she drives her knee up and stamps down on his insole in one smooth motion. They use the moment to escape. At one point he grabs her wrist and drags her down the hall despite her efforts to turn around, protesting that the fight could spill out into the rest of the hotel and put surface-worlders at risk.

“The chances are low,” he argues.

“But they’re not zero!” Raimei yanks back on him, pulling him to a stop with a jerk. “We should—”

“Are you following my lead or aren’t you?” he snaps back, grabbing her again. 

Raimei looks briefly wounded before shaking her head. “Fine.”

Gau has been waiting for them in the first-floor restaurant, and noticing their hurry collects his supplies and follows them outside. Once they’re a safe distance away Raikou raises his arm and Gau steps underneath it, knitting together in a way that makes Raimei roll her eyes. (“It’s not that I’m against you two, I just can’t stand seeing my _brother_ being so gross,” she’d explained once.)

Let her, Raikou thinks. Let her argue and let her roll her eyes. She’ll understand how he feels someday. Looking at Gau, he adds ‘About a lot of things.’

**

They’re in the bathroom when Gau says, “She’s not angry with you,” before tipping a bucket over his head, wetting his hair.

Raikou is quietly looking at the wall, avoiding telling Gau he’s guessed correctly. Gau would never rub it in, but still he can’t help but hide. “I know that.” He hasn’t said anything about their disagreement; Gau just always seems to know these things. Or he talks to Raimei. He doesn’t know which one he’s more afraid of: being known, or a Raimei-Gau alliance (as if it doesn’t already exist). 

He bends over to wash his feet; he usually stands to wash his body instead of sitting, a habit he picked up from Dad before Dad got too ill to do so without Mom’s support. He has a sense memory and a flash of Dad kneeling in front of him, tickling the soles of his feet to make him laugh, and smiles sadly at his own toes. There’s a certain melancholy knowing nobody will ever do that again.

“Raikou-san?”

“Mm?”

“You look distracted.”

“It’s nothing.”

Gau doesn’t look like he believes him, but then he gets shampoo in his eyes and moans, rubbing furiously.

“Here,” he says, going to him and pressing a washcloth to his eyes, wiping surely. He presses a kiss to his forehead, after. Gau’s hair smells like that artificial rainwater scent, pleasant if nothing like the real thing. “Even if she were angry, I’ll survive.”

“It’s hard to be a leader,” Gau says, rubbing at his eyes still. “But you can do it.”

“You’re the second person to tell me that recently.”

Gau tilts his head up, hoping to be kissed again. Raikou acquiesces. “You deserve to hear it.”

**

“What are we doing?” Raimei asks him while they’re gardening, and Raikou doesn’t look up from pulling weeds out of the soil as he says, “Gardening?”

It’s been a few days since the incident and, he admits, he’s being cute on purpose. Siblings, he can’t help it.

“No, with the clan. We haven’t been investigating, we haven’t been following anyone, and we don’t—” she stabs the ground with a tool, “We haven’t even been trying to recruit anyone. Is this really the way we want to be forever?”

“I’m working on it,” he says, defensive, and tosses another weed over his shoulder. Truth is, he has not been working on it because he has no idea how to begin approaching people about this. He knows they need followers, but not how to get them. Approaching people has really become more of a Gau Task anyway.

“Just let me go out and meet people,” she tries again, pestering him about this for the past few months. “I could do it and you could sit at home hiding from criticism.”

“I am _not_.”

Raimei’s passionate commitment, to put it kindly, to honesty means she has no tolerance for deception, even self-deception. “You’ve been off ever since that guy asked you if we’re necessary.” She sighs. “I already told you we are. What more do you want?” She gently claps him on the back of the head, mussing his ponytail just enough to annoy him.

He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, but outside validation doesn’t help as much as he wishes it would. He looks down at his dirty hands, ragged nails and all, and remembers them being covered in familial blood. “What if we do belong, but I don’t?”

Raimei groans. “No, no, no, none of that ‘Raikou doesn’t like himself, so nobody else should!’”

He frowns because while she’s correct, she didn’t have to say it aloud.

“I like you! Gau likes you! You even still have those friends from Kairoshuu right? Miharu even said you were cool once.”

“Really?” He had no idea he cared what Miharu thought of him until now.

“Really!” She puts her hands on her hips, looking down at him. “You re-founded the clan, you’re the leader, so _you_ take responsibility for us already.”

What have the last few years been, he wants to ask, but she is correct. He’s been hiding ever since that blow. He still believes in the clan to his core, but not in himself. Raimei’s right to be tired of it.

“She’s right!” Gau calls from inside the house; Raimei’s voice naturally carries, so of course he heard it.

“We’re only here because we think you can do it, Raikou,” Raimei says, voice not unkind, not without love. “But if you’re tired of it, I can always challenge you for the title.”

“You wouldn’t get very far,” he says with a hint of amusement.

“Fight me, then!”

The garden gets forgotten, much to Gau’s chagrin.

**

So Raimei sets out, carrying a letter of introduction from Gau, and she’s gone for a month. When she returns she’s dragging someone down the road leading up to the house by the arm, and Raikou almost drops the books he’s sorting for Gau in his surprise.

Her voice carries ahead of her: “He’s not that hard to read. He’ll be thrilled, promise! What are you looking so shy for?”

The person’s a woman, long hair swinging behind her and her indeed looking shy, and Raimei all but throws her in front when they come up to him.

“This is Izuna Shiki!” she announces. “She wants to join us!”

Izuna plays with her hands but nods at Raimei’s words.

“Why?” he says without thinking.

Izuna takes him seriously, at first looking scared and then nodding to herself, softly clearing her throat, and saying, “I come from a long line of—” She stops to think before her voice lowers, disgusted, “endless, pointless violence. I’ve lost too many family and friends to see any point in remaining in the Nabari world.” She nods. “But I couldn’t find the courage to live a normal life in the surface world, either. When Raimei-san came to my village, she was the first person to tell me there was another way.” Shutting her eyes, she finishes with, “I guess that sounds like I just want to run away, but I promise: I believe in your vision for your family.”

Raikou focuses on the books before saying, “What exactly did she tell you?”

“It was all in Meguro-san’s letter.” She looks over Raikou’s shoulder, and without looking he can sense Gau behind him. “When I read about you as he saw you...well, sir, I just had to meet you.”

Okay, now Raikou really needs to know what other people are saying about him. He admits he didn’t even read the letter before approving it, waving Gau off with a, “You know what you’re doing.” He turns his head to look at Gau, who smiles at him.

“None of it’s a lie,” he says fondly.

“First,” he says, turning back to Izuna, “never call me ‘sir’ again. Second,” he fetches a practice sword and tosses it to her, noting with pleasure that she catches it easily and appears to hold it with the correct grip. “Let me evaluate you and we’ll see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \-- Shiki is an OC from when i was 17, i am sure her story is thrilling but i sure as hell cannot remember it now  
> \-- title from "Burn" by Alkaline Trio, [here is a Nabari AMV using it](https://youtu.be/WEpbkkDda4E)  
> \-- you guys are still very, very nice, thank you so much


	7. Bite down to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Bite Down" by Bastille. Sexual content in this chapter.

“Raikou-san?” Gau asks, voice husky if concerned, as he sits in the cradle of Raikou’s lap, arms around his neck. Raikou’s hand is on Gau’s inner thigh, fingertips playing with the edge of his underwear. They’re no strangers to sexual contact now, except for one thing: the part where Raikou won’t let him reciprocate whatsoever. He’ll do anything to Gau that Gau asks of him, but doesn’t want him to return the favor. He gently pushes away touches and questions and, well, Gau is used to Raikou punishing himself, but when Gau’s horny it’s also a punishment for him and Gau can’t get him to just understand that...

He’s desperate, to say it plain. To make the other feel good, to feel good himself. He’s gotten him off exactly twice, once with his hands and once with his mouth, learning that the sensation of someone finishing in his mouth was not unpleasant but he definitely had to spit afterwards. There was the time where he woke up to Raikou grinding on him in his sleep and breathing hard as he came, Gau laying there thinking, “This is happening,” and Raikou was completely mortified when he realized and laid facedown in his pillow, not responding to Gau’s reassurances that he was Really not offended, it was kind of erotic actually, and—

He rubs his hand against Raikou’s erection, enjoying the pleased whine he gives, but again he shakes his head and murmurs not to worry about him.

“But I want to,” Gau says, disappointed, and Raikou picks up on that and his face darkens and he lifts Gau up slightly, indicating to get off of him. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not!” God he loves this man and he wants to shake him all at once. He grabs Raikou’s face with his hands, looking into his eyes, seeing he looks trapped. “I just want to make you feel good.”

“You do.”

“Then let me.”

Raikou doesn’t answer him.

Gau closes his legs and gently keeps Raikou’s hands off of him, smiling sadly. “Goodnight.”

They lay in bed not talking.

**

Izuna is good; she does everything Gau asks of her from laundry to cutting wood to sparring. She’s eager, polite, and, if a little insecure, it works in her favor as she works even harder. Gau is difficult to impress; he’s comparing her to both the example he’s set and their vision for the future.

And it is hard to share his time with Raikou and Raimei, as they throw themselves into training her. She’s trained with a sword before, and is proficient in the basics, but has choked during sparring before.

“If this were a real battle, I just struck the decisive blow,” Raikou informs her, backing off from where she is on the ground.

“Yes, Raikou-san,” she croaks, holding her chest where he struck her.

Gau fully admits it gets his back up to hear anyone else call him Raikou-san, but he supposes he has to get used to it. Raikou seems to prefer it.

“You’re getting better!” Raimei promises as she helps Izuna to her feet; Raimei has adopted her and Izuna follows the siblings like a duckling. Gau doesn’t know what he did to not earn the same treatment, but he isn’t jealous. He’s not. Raimei says he is ‘scary’ and Raikou says that, perhaps, maybe a little, Gau is hard on her, not that that’s a problem Gau, just—

“I wouldn’t get her hopes up,” Gau says, arms crossed, and Raimei frowns at him.

“Do you think that’s helpful?” she says.

“Raikou-san is right, if this were a real fight—”

Raikou whacks him in the shins with his practice sword and Gau bites down the rest of his words.

“She can learn,” Raikou says, sterner, and Gau tightens his arms over his chest. He’s caught Raikou smiling at her when she can’t see it. Raimei was right, he’s thrilled and disbelieving that anyone would look up to him. Izuna does; she hangs on his words when he dares tell her his memories of the clan (Raimei tells stories more often, with vigor and pride; Raikou is hesitant but nods along with her stories, sometimes adding his own flavor text).

“Of course. Sorry, Raikou-san,” Gau says.

Raikou nods and turns back to Izuna. “You _are_ learning. Don’t be discouraged.”

Izuna nods, looking to him like he holds all the answers.

**

They send Izuna to shadow Raimei; she gets hurt. Raikou sits with her the entire time in the hospital and Gau brings him food and drink and distractions. He ignores them all.

“It’s fine, Raikou-san,” she tells him as they’re leaving, her on crutches. She’ll regain mobility in her leg, the doctor said, but it might be a struggle to fight again. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

“That is not my concern,” Raikou says, sounding lost.

Gau takes his hand and holds it.

“That wasn’t your fault—” he tries later that night as they sit watching the stars.

“I’m the leader. It is my responsibility.”

“Well, you didn’t—”

“Gau,” Raikou says, harder. “Will you allow me my feelings for one moment?”

“Not when they’re completely irrational,” Gau retorts, putting his hand on Raikou’s knee. Gau’s hands are reaching out for him right now, and Raikou won’t take them, and he wants to scream.

Raikou puts his hands over his knees and squeezes Gau’s hand so hard that it hurts, not out of anger but out of hurt. “You never let me pity myself anymore,” he says, trying to sound light and utterly failing.

Gau kisses his cheek. “You shouldn’t talk about the person I love that way.”

Raikou burrows his head between Gau’s neck and shoulder and sighs. “You love me,” he states.

“You don’t get to decide what you mean to me,” Gau informs him, plain and honest.

“What happened to the boy whose answer to my every word was, ‘Yes, Raikou-san?’”

Gau nuzzles the top of his head. “He grew up.” And he admitted he was in love, and he built a home for that man, and he found a family, and and and... Gau has been doing stupid things for Raikou since before he knew he was in love with him, since he was a kid who thought he loved nothing more than justice. He was wrong.

“He did.”

“Yes, Raikou-san,” Gau teases.

**

Gau wakes with the worst headache and nausea of his life. Never again will he go drinking with Raikou and Yukimi, he swears. He remembers Yukimi all but forcing more beer down his throat; kneeling down on the ground outside the bar covering his mouth; being taken to an izakaya and forced to eat grilled chicken and intestines in hopes of sopping up liquor. He is very bad at being drunk, essentially.

“What did I do?” he asks Raikou, who seems embarrassed to say.

“You talk too much,” he finally admits. “Yukimi-senpai knows...things he shouldn’t, now.”

“Like what?” Gau says, horror growing.

Raikou rubs the back of his head and keeps mum.

“Raikou-san!”

Still nothing. Gau groans and falls back on his futon, covering his face. He lays in bed most of the day, sick, and Izuna brings him food and a sports drink, to his continued nausea. She’s in her mid-20s, he knows, and probably has had this experience at least once.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Of course, Meguro-san.” He can’t get her to call him ‘Gau’ to save his life. She’s still the tiniest bit shy around him, but it doesn’t feel obsequious.

Gau tries to take a bite of his rice, the texture feeling mealy in his mouth. He’s had a question to ask her for a long time and he figures why not now, when they’re alone. “Izuna-san, what does your family think of your choice?”

“My mother doesn’t understand,” she admits. “She thinks I should come home before I’m completely outcast, but I think she’s being optimistic.”

Gau knows the feeling. “And how do you feel about it?”

“Wonderful.” She plays with her hair. “I needed to escape my old life, and I believe in this new one. You and Raimei-san and Raikou-san. There was… I had nobody,” she admits. “Nobody I cared to keep in my life. I care about you three.”

Gau likes that answer. “What would you do if you met somebody who wants you to leave?”

“I would leave them first.”

She’s saying all the right things, but still… “And if I told you to leave? If Raikou-san did?”

She chuckles. “I would cry my eyes out, sir. Throw myself at your feet, humiliate myself. All to stay by your sides.”

Yeah. Gau knows how that feels. He would sooner die than leave this behind. Correction: he wouldn’t let himself die and leave Raikou behind once before. He doesn’t know what he’d do if Raikou decided that they were a mistake.

“I’ve bet everything on you,” she continues. “I know you find me lacking, forgive my boldness. But I want to earn your respect.” Quieter, “How can I do that, sir?”

“Just do your best,” Gau says, gentler. Perhaps he is too hard. “Be a just person. Be patient and tough. I don’t dislike you.” He tries to smile at her. “I promise I’ll be kind.”

Izuna bows her head. “You don’t have to say that. I don’t mean to be so weak.”

“You aren’t. Only a strong person stays by our side. You’ll make enemies,” he says. “but you don’t seem like you care.”

“I can tell you’ve always kept your family safe,” she says. “I’ve heard stories about you.”

“What?”

“Your letters. Your networking, really. You have a lot of friends, too, Meguro-san. The Nabari world is better because you’re in it.”

Gau hopes that’s true. He swallows bile. “If you would—”

“Of course,” she says, wobbling away on her crutch.

Gau ponders that he’s never so knowledgable he can’t learn something new about himself. He sets up his bed desk and his writing supplies. Then he begins, as he is always beginning.

**

It was supposed to be an easy mission, until Gau got stabbed in the chest.

“Breathe,” Raikou pleads, on his hands and knees over Gau, pressing down on the wound in his chest. Gau is sick of being wounded there. “Please breathe, Gau.” ‘Don’t leave me,’ is implied in his face, pure pain and doubt and blame. He bends closer, grabbing his face, and exhales into his mouth, lips sealed together, trying to force air past the sharp pain in his chest.

Gau thinks, with clarity, that his lung is collapsing. He’s struggling, Raikou is right, his chest caving in, and between rescue breaths he says, “Raikou,” softly. ‘Please don’t let go,’ he begs in his mind, before he blacks out.

He wakes up again, bound up in wires and alone, and when Izuna notices him upon returning, she runs back out of the room, coming back and all but dragging Raikou along with her. Raikou grips his face with the knowledge he’s almost lost him and his kiss is more like breathing for him again, until it hurts. He is crying.

“I told you not to leave my side. You almost broke your promise,” he gets out, a mess.

“I didn’t mean to,” Gau says. “Shh, don’t cry, Raikou,” he says, at first not noticing the honorific hasn’t slipped past his lips too. It didn’t earlier, either, he realizes suddenly.

“What did you call me?” Raikou asks, uncertain and hopeful.

“Y-You heard me,” Gau says, embarrassed. “I can stop—”

Raikou grips his hair so tightly he moans. “Don’t you dare.”

**

‘Raikou,’ becomes Gau’s word of the day, every single day. ‘Good morning, Raikou.’ ‘Are you hungry, Raikou?’ ‘Raikou, please let me do that.’

“Raikou, lay down,” Gau says, pushing him back onto the futon as he straddles his lap. “Please let me.”

“I…” Raikou starts, and then exhales hard.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know.” His face softens, showing his trust.

Knowing that there’s a core of him that Gau hasn’t yet touched drives him crazy. “What are you afraid of?” he presses for the umpteenth time. 

And to his surprise, Raikou answers, “I’m frightened that I’ll like it.”

“That’s the point,” Gau laughs.

“And I’m afraid that I’ll disappoint you.”

“What am I going to do with you?” Gau says against his mouth. “That’s the point of learning.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Gau repeats, not quite mocking him. Raikou lets him pin one hand up by his head, and then the other. He looks at Gau plaintively, asking for patience, asking for forgiveness. There is plenty of the former and no need for the latter, Gau thinks. “That settles it,” he says, face growing hot at his boldness. “Tonight is all about you.”

Between his focused and occasionally sexually frustrated studying about how two men can have sex and his own ability to read Raikou, Gau thinks he doesn’t do a bad job. Fraught, anxious tension melts into the right kind of tension, the taut muscle turning to fluttering, wavering movements under his hands. At one point Raikou bites down on Gau’s wrist, claws his back up, breaking the skin, panting. He isn’t wrong about not knowing his own strength but Gau doesn’t care. It’s captivating, and he’s not sure who’s captured whom.

Raikou wraps his legs around his waist at one point, making it impossible for him to move but it doesn’t matter. He uses his lower body strength to pull him closer, grinding against his lower belly and fucking his hand, using him to get off at this point. He gasps, a high sharp sound, when he comes, legs trembling and squeezing the back of his neck hard.

Yeah. Gau did a good job. He sinks to his elbows above the other, strokes him hip to inner thigh. He’s so hard he’s in pain but that’s not important right now. Until Raikou of course disagrees, pressing his palm to him and in barely a murmur offers to suck him off. He is adorably shy about doing that but it still feels good. Involuntarily, Gau tugs on Raikou’s hair until he pulls off to say, “Stop that.” Perhaps he shouldn’t have hair the perfect length for it, Gau thinks.

When they’re done he’s facedown in bed, Raikou dabbing at his back with a washcloth and apologizing, embarrassed.

“It’s fine.”

“It is _not_.”


	8. Take root, take flight, I command it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Children, Children" from Bat Boy: The Musical.
> 
> I refuse to believe that once Gau starts drinking he does not, like, drunk dial people to give them A Piece of His Mind, not that he needs alcohol to do that but it definitely comes out even stronger when he's drunk. Next chapter is, like, maybe, perhaps, back to a plot.

Another year passes. Soon Izuna has a companion, a man from Fuuma, Isao, and the two keep each other company. Raikou has no idea how he got so lucky to have these fledglings. Watching them spar he notes with pleasure that Izuna has benefited from his teachings as she edges out the man easily. When she’s exhausted her opponent she looks to him for approval.

“Very good,” he says, clapping his hands together, and she beams.

**

“I told you to wait for me,” Raikou says as he carries him to the end of the road, where an ambulance is waiting for them. Gau will let him have this ‘I told you so;‘ he gets so few opportunities for them. Usually it’s Gau, who does not take them because often Raikou feels bad enough. Gau was rushing, stepped off the veranda without looking, and his full body weight fell on his ankle. He can’t move it without searing pain. Gau is so over being hurt in general. He feels like he just had the pneumothorax even though it was a year ago now. (‘Stop collecting scars,’ Raimei said bluntly once and he protested that he didn’t _try_ to do that.)

Raikou’s face is harder than normal because he hates seeing Gau hurt; it sets off some kind of internal alarm in him that’s short of panic. Gau adjusts the arm he’s slung around Raikou’s neck. “I’m really okay,” he says. “Hey,” and he puts a hand on Raikou’s cheek, making him look at him and smiling. Raikou pauses before kissing his forehead and nodding, seeing everything is fine.

The fix for Gau’s ankle is simple, though he really hates anesthesia. They put a plate and screws in his ankle and he’s hobbling out on a crutch the next day. Which opens up the fact that he cannot stand being useless.

“Um, sir, I really have to ask you not to do that,” Shiki says, watching him try to balance and pick up firewood with his free hand. “Raikou-san instructed me—”

“I know what he said,” he snaps, and then apologizes to her. He’s tried his best to keep his promise not to be so hard on her, especially when he has a new target in Isao.

Shiki sits down on the stump, after collecting the wood from him firmly, and, looking wistful, says, “Sir? Can I ask you a personal question?”

“What is it?”

“How did you know you loved Raikou-san?”

Gau splutters and leans on his crutch, looking at his feet. He can’t possibly answer that question, although upon reflection he realizes he never wants to shut up about Raikou normally. “What on Earth makes you think that’s— I mean— Why do you want to know?”

Shiki seals her lips and covers her face before saying, “Forget it, that was inappropriate, I’m sorry sir!” in a rush.

Gau is quick on the uptake; he thinks of how he’s seen her watching Isao, how she leaps to teach him and physically guide his movements, how though her attempts at humor awkwardly fall flat (she’s so serious nobody can tell when she’s joking), Isao always laughs.

“Oh,” he says, and she reads into it and shakes her head.

“I don’t want to cause an inconvenience in case he rejects me. I won’t say anything.”

“No, no, you should.” He makes his way toward her and pats her shoulder. “And really, there are a lot of moments where I _should’ve_ realized that I loved him, a long time before I confessed.” He laughs. “Really, it was so obvious in hindsight.” Or rather, he knew he loved Raikou for a long, long time but he didn’t think it was okay to be in love with him. That he was confusing it with deep admiration, or loyalty, or reveling in their shared purpose. He’s never been in love before Raikou, how the hell was he supposed to know? “I knew when he broke his arm.”

“Really?”

“Yes. We walked into an obvious trap and though he was hurt, he never stopped trying to save me.” He points to the scar on his neck. “So I saved him first. Almost threw my life away, actually.”

“That’s so…” She shakes her head. “Actually crazy, sir.”

“I know. That’s what we do for each other, though. That would’ve been the second time I did something really, really stupid for him. He makes me act unlike myself, but I don’t mind. I love him. You don’t have to do anything like that for Isao-san, but I don’t think telling him how you feel would be so bad.”

“I see…” She covers her mouth and with alarm he realizes she’s tearing up. He has never seen Shiki cry, even when she gets hurt, even when he scolds her within an inch of her life. “What if he rejects me?”

“You won’t know unless you try, Shiki-san.”

Gau’s recovered and is off his crutch when he _thinks_ she’s made a move. He doesn’t look for it of course, he’s just, well, it’s his job to know what’s going on around here, isn’t it? (Though he tries not to involve himself anymore, he’s always aware when Raikou and Raimei are having a tiff, mostly because Raikou sighs a lot in his Ask-me-what’s-wrong-but-also-don’t fashion.) 

Shiki and Isao are accompanying him on a mission when, as it often does, violence finds them and Gau watches her put her sword directly between Isao and a threat, absorbing the blow with great effort, and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s what love looks like among samurai.’ (Gau is glad, for the record, that he was never a samurai. Though he didn’t need to be to throw himself in front of a blade.)

One day, Isao slips and calls her just ‘Shiki’ in front of the others and then, unexpectedly, she takes his hand and announces, “Isao and I are getting married.”

Gau’s unvarnished opinion, as it often does, comes out: “It has been six months.”

“We’ve known each other for a year before that,” Isao mutters, before realizing who he just talked back to and apologizing hurriedly. Gau would be lying if he said he did not enjoy his reputation around here.

Raikou puts a hand over Gau’s mouth. “They’re both adults, Gau,” he says, almost tutting, before saying to them, “Congratulations.”

“We have a big favor to ask, actually,” Isao says.

“Hm?”

They bow together, still holding hands. “We both want to take your last name,” Shiki says.

“Of course you can!” Raimei exclaims, jumping and pulling them upright and putting an arm around both of them. “Welcome to the Shimizu _family_.”

“Ah, Raimei—”

“Don’t, Raikou,” she warns. She nods to Gau. “When are you going to change his last name?”

In his surprise, Raikou actually drops Gau, then of course frets if he’s alright.

**

Raikou runs an errand.

Thankfully Gau did not ask what Raikou wanted cash for, just patted his pockets for his wallet and handed it over. Raikou feels the need to explain anyway, and Gau nods. He’s familiar enough with Raikou’s omamori collection, even carefully dusted them before they invested in frames for them and now they hang on their bedroom wall. It makes sense he’d want another one.

On the bus home from picking up his omamori, Raikou sighs and stares out the window, running his thumb over it again and again. He wonders if he’s an absolute fool. Glimpsing his reflection in the window, he frowns at his hair, ugly and bland. He needs a change. Maybe this is the right decision. Of course _Gau_ is the right decision.

“What’s that for?” Gau asks when he notices the crane design on the latest one. The omamori he and Raikou carry are for unmarried couples; Raikou usually has the pink one dangling from his hair and Gau wears the blue one on a string around his neck, tucked underneath his tie.

The one Raikou bought is for married couples, just the one as even numbers are considered unlucky for marriage omamori.

“Oh, it’s for Shiki-san and Isao-san, for their wedding,” Raikou says, the lie as smooth as silver.

**

Raikou makes a phone call, hiding in their bedroom while Gau is working in the garden with Raimei.

“Why?” Yukimi says flatly over the phone. “Why do you _both_ involve me in your relationship? Why do you think I want to know—”

Raikou asks, “Gau calls you? About what?”

“Tell him to stop drinking,” is all Yukimi says, sounding uncomfortable like he wishes he hadn’t brought it up.

Well now Raikou has to know, but he didn’t call about that (Gau will crack with the right amount of pressure put on him). “I—”

“Let me guess: you two had a fight and you think he hates you.”

Is he so predictable? He's almost offended. “No—”

“Okay, you, of all people, are calling to tell me about your sex life.”

“Senpai, listen to me!” he exclaims. “I— Ah— How do I—”

“What?”

“How do I propose?” he says, feeling his face grow hotter than the sun.

“What makes you think I know?” True, he can’t remember Yukimi going on a single date the entire time he’s known him, not that he made that his business. “It makes sense that you’d be dumb about this. You buy a ring and get down on one knee and then, if I know Gau, he’s going to burst into tears and say, ‘Yes.’”

“Are you certain?”

“Raikou, how do you not know this by now? Your blind spot is about 160 centimeters tall and squawks all the time. Didn’t you two build a freakin’ house together?” He laughs. “He already sees you as his family, and he doesn’t wanna be your brother.” In the background there’s a meow, then several more. “Hey, stop that— Sorry I gotta go. Remember: stop calling me about your relationship.” A pause. “Let’s meet up this month.” He hangs up.

Raikou holds the phone with both hands, worrying his lip, and sighs. It’s a non-issue. Of course Gau will say yes. Raikou only need ask him.

Isn’t that the problem.

**

They’re rushing to get ready for the wedding, as both woke up uncharacteristically late. Raikou is still messing with his hair when Gau plucks something off of the table behind him. Raikou watches him in the mirror.

“Oh, we almost forgot this,” Gau says, tucking it into an envelope. The marriage omamori. “It’s very thoughtful of you.”

Raikou freezes, mind spinning, before he says, “I—” Raikou raises both his hands, dumbfounded, and, noticing his hesitation, Gau raises an eyebrow. ‘You are too intelligent to not see who that is for,’ Raikou thinks desperately. But Gau says nothing, and the moment passes. “I suppose I did forget,” Raikou gets out.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says, feeling defeated and like he should find the nearest flat surface and bang his head against it.

**

The wedding ceremony is very nice, if only attended by the three of them and the happy couple. There are tears, laughter, fumbling of vows and with rings, and finally a sweet kiss. After, they get too drunk at home, except for Raimei who only looks at them with surprise and shakes her head. Raikou disappears at one point and Gau finds him in the old grove, standing before the small monument they erected when they could afford it that honors the dead from the Shimizu clan.

Gau braces himself for some talk about do they deserve to be happy, standing on graves, but instead Raikou sinks onto his backside before flopping backwards, head lolling. Too drunk to speak coherently, he rolls onto his stomach and turns into a ragdoll when Gau tries to get him up. Gau needs Raimei’s help to lift him and carry him to bed; she also does the honors of getting water, seeing the state Gau is in, too, and she says, “This is why I don’t drink.”

“You’re a minor,” he hiccups. “You shouldn’t.”

Raimei jabs him in the forehead with her pointer finger and he swears he’s about to fall over from it. After he rolls Raikou into the recovery position, facing the bucket in case he vomits, he digs through his trusty old bag from the Kairoshuu days, fraying and holey but still good in his estimation, and retrieves his cell phone.

“Yukimi-san, when am I gonna get married?” he says, controlling his slurring (he thinks).

“What did I just tell Raikou…” Yukimi mutters, and then Gau hears rustling on the other end of the line like he’s clearing a space to sit down. His apartment is never any less terrible when Gau sees it. “Stop drunk-dialing me, Tenpa.”

“God, I’m twenty-one, stop calling me thaaaaat.”

“You have one minute and then I’m hanging up.”

“You wouldn’t do that to Raikou.”

“Raikou doesn’t do this to me.”

“How do two people who’ve known each other for a year-and-a-half get married, and I can’t propose? I’ve known Raikou since I was thirteen, where’s my wedding?!” He swallows, coughs, and then lowers his voice. He looks at Raikou, who’s still breathing deeply and asleep. “What’s wrong with me, Yukimi-san? Wait, don’t answer that, you’re an asshole.”

“Too late,” Yukimi says and briskly rattles off his list of Things Wrong With Gau, to which Gau rolls his eyes and tells him what to do with himself. “Thirty seconds.”

“I wanna be marrieeeed,” he whines, hating the sound of himself.

“Then propose to him, geez, I am so tired of you two being like this. What did I tell you a long time ago? Perhaps,” he pauses, “there is something he’s hoping you’ll ask after. I know you, you aren’t the type to just sit there and watch what he wants go by.”

“What do you know?”

“Too much about your sex life, now I’m out.” The call ends with a beep and Gau scowls at his phone.

Gau picks up his pillow and tries to scream into it, but no sound comes out. He gags, and then stumbles over Raikou in his quest for the bucket. At one point while he’s throwing up he feels Raikou rubbing his back; he’s sat up to keep him company, and pushes Gau’s hair back from his forehead when he looks up.

“Water,” Raikou gets out intelligibly, and forces the bottle into Gau’s hand. They collapse, one on top of the other, and Gau fists his hands in the front of Raikou’s pajamas.

“Could you see us getting married?” he says quietly.

Raikou starts to snore.

**

Raikou expects an odd look for buying a second marriage omamori within a week, but the shrine could care less so why should he? He has a mission here, and all but runs back to the bus.

He finds Gau in the yard with their followers, assigning chores for the day, and Raikou interrupts to drag him away by the upper arm. “Raikou, what the—” 

He drags him to the grove where the amaryllis have returned. Then, standing before him, mouth open, he thinks, ‘I am going to vomit,’ and covers his mouth, swallowing the bile that comes up.

“Raikou…” Gau says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “If you’re not feeling well—”

“I’m fine!” No choice but to power through, he thinks, swallowing again and acid burning his throat. Shoving his hand in his pocket, he grabs the charm and holds it out, the words not coming at first and then, almost a stutter, “This is ours. If you—if you want it. To be wed, I mean.” He gags this time. He must be making the most wonderful, romantic impression right now.

Gau, normally so clever, takes a long moment to consider the charm as if not understanding the significance of it. He takes it from Raikou, examining the crane design and murmuring something Raikou can’t hear over the blood rushing in his ears.

“You accidentally gave away the old one, or I would have done this earlier,” Raikou goes on. His hands are shaking and he hides them by crossing his arms, hiding himself. God he wants to hide.

“This is for me?” Gau finally says, sounding confused, and there’s that one moment of doubt that Raikou allows himself, before shoving it down. No, no, no, for once he will be brave and admit he wants. Gau laughs, disbelieving, and in a moment is wiping at his eyes, trying to get words out, and says, “Did you really doubt what I’d say?”

“No?” he lies.

_”If I know Gau, he’s going to burst into tears and say, ‘Yes.’”_

Yukimi was wrong about one thing: Gau laughs and cries, nodding and rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his palm. He does not say yes but he doesn’t have to. He throws his arms around Raikou’s neck and almost tries to climb him; Raikou lifts him off of the ground, easy as can be. Yes, he may be teary-eyed as well.

When the scene is over with and the only sound is the wind moving through the bamboo, Gau looks up at the sky, face still wet, and Raikou looks over his shoulder at the monument. He turns to face it and bows his head. ‘Mom,’ he thinks, ‘I’m starting my own family now. I hope if you can see this, you’ll bless it.’ 

There’s no way of knowing what Mom would think.

And that’s okay. Raikou trusts that this is a good decision.

Then Gau jumps on his back, clinging to his neck and ruining his moment, and Raikou doesn’t mind.

“Let’s go tell the others,” he breathes, nuzzling the back of his head.

“Yes, let’s.”

**

Gau throws down his notebook; Raikou looks on with curiosity, lying on his stomach in bed. “What’s wrong?”

“I just did the math. It’s going to take us more than two years to save for this wedding. Between the loan and maintenance on the house and feeding everyone here—”

Raikou nudges Gau’s knee, shaking him. He knows exactly what’s about to happen and best short it out now. “Gau.”

“—and we can barely work enough hours to cover the bills as it is, and—”

“Gau.”

“—I have so many people to invite or they’ll be offended, and then we have to feed all of them—”

Raikou sits up and gives a patented clap to the back of Gau’s head. “ _Gau._ Listen to me.”

Gau blinks at him. He picks his notebook back up and holds it over his chest like a shield. “What, Raikou?”

“So let’s not have the wedding. I only want to marry you.” Raikou palms his cheek and smiles when Gau melts into the touch.

“But you wanted—”

“I know what I said; it doesn’t matter if it means we have to delay being a married couple.” He leans over and kisses Gau, then scoots over so he can bracket Gau with his legs. “I just want you, at the end of the day.”

Gau sets his notebook aside and crawls so he’s on his hands and knees over Raikou’s lap, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “You just want me to be quiet,” he teases.

Raikou presses a hand to the small of his back and pushes him down until their pelvises almost touch. Gau, reading him, puts his arms around his neck and eases down until he’s resting against the other’s chest.

**

Raikou leaves collecting the appropriate paperwork to Gau; he just finds a kimono he likes and then works on gathering all the money he can find, saving it bit-by-bit as Gau usually budgets for them both, in order to buy it. Then one morning, starting before even Gau has woken up, he dyes his hair. It feels like returning to himself when he paints on the dye, knowing it’s worth the effort.

“Your hair,” Gau says when he wakes, lighting up. He reaches up and pulls on the ends of Raikou’s hair, still wet from the rinse. “Oh, I missed this.”

He had to for the occasion, the soft candy pink he wore back when they met. Pink feels nice again. It feels like him.

The day comes quick and far too slow at the same time.

“Come on, come on,” Gau says the morning of the municipal office appointment, beckoning to everyone to hurry up. Raimei, lovingly, shoulder checks him on her way past him, holding Shiki’s hand and laughing with her about something. When he sees Raikou he actually covers his mouth, before a smile peeks out around his fingers. “Raikou…”

He turns, inspecting his kimono to make sure nothing is out of place. Raimei helped him get dressed, and as she did she joked once, “Don’t screw this up; he’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”

“I know,” Raikou’d said, and let her help put his hair up.

He touches the lapel of Gau’s suit, which is already perfect. He removes the hand covering Gau’s mouth and squeezes it, letting it dangle between them. “Let’s get married.”

Yukimi and Miharu meet them at the office, Miharu snapping a photo of the two of them, then the entire clan. Raimei reaches over and ruffles his hair; he’s just barely taller than her now and smiles easy for her. 

“Well, this was a long time coming,” is all Yukimi says, and then after rubbing the back of his neck, “Congrats.”

“Thank you for coming, senpai.”

“Have to make sure you lock this down,” Yukimi says to Gau, who makes a face at him. Raikou pulls him towards the front door of the office.

They have to wait; they arrived too early thanks to Gau, and they are definitely the most overdressed group here. Raikou and Gau sit apart from the other three.

“Oh,” Gau says, retrieving a ring box from his pocket. “Let’s put these on beforehand.” Not taking Raikou’s hesitation for an answer, Gau grabs his hand and slides the ring on his finger, a gold band that he said would match the shades Raikou likes to paint his nails.

When he does the same to Gau, Raikou feels wetness prick at the inner corners of his eyes, and wills himself not to cry. He fails. Gau laughs shyly when they hold up their hands, showing each other the proof.

The ring on Gau’s finger feels like a brand as Raikou holds his hand at the clerk’s desk, who reviews their paperwork and with zero ceremony, to his disappointment, pronounces them legally wed. This does not stop the others from throwing confetti and blowing noisemakers in the office, and they get kicked out.

If Raikou had known back then that they would be here today, he wouldn’t have believed he deserved this. Looking askance at Gau, who is definitely crying as Raimei slings her arm around his neck and Yukimi is poking his cheek and saying, “Stop that, this is a good day,” and Miharu is asking if he’s alright, Raikou can believe that he does deserve this.

Needless to say, they disappear after they get home from the makeshift reception at a restaurant. Don’t even say goodbye to Yukimi and Miharu or goodnight to the others, just run off to their room holding hands.

“Don’t rip the obi,” Raikou scolds as Gau is fiddling with it, then he hears a sigh and a muttered swear word.

“I’m not going to worry about this,” he says, and uses the element of surprise and a forceful shove to put Raikou on his knees.

Raikou looks up at him and leans into the hand on his cheek. He feels caught but he doesn’t want to escape. Gau kneels down and pushes Raikou onto his back, then pulls the excess fabric up so it bunches around his waist. “Hold that out of the way,” he instructs.

He takes off just enough clothes to fuck him, reassuring him that yes he will clean the kimono if it stains, and at one point Raikou catches his tie and drags him down to kiss him; he’s shivering and it has nothing to do with the temperature.

“You could’ve allowed me to undress,” he says after, with an accusatory stare at the back of Gau’s head, who is currently hiding his face in his hands like he’s Raikou. Raikou, who turns to blotting at a lube stain and wonders if the dry cleaner will know what the other stain is from. “This is silk, Gau.”

“I know, I’m sorry!” Gau says, throwing up his hands.

‘Yes,’ Raikou thinks, ‘there’s my husband.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eta 3/10/21: i was rightly informed that this chapter could use some work, so i added on what i planned to do with Ch 9.
> 
> hey fuck you i can write jizz on a kimono if i feel like it.


	9. Take heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [waves my arms] Hey, stop! If you didn’t see, Chapter 8 had new sections added to it so please go back and Ctrl+F “Raikou expects” to find the new material.

The Nabari and surface worlds intertwine in the most mundane spaces. A hotel meeting room this time, late afternoon sunlight slanting on the walls, the air a little too warm. ‘This is awkward,’ Gau thinks as he considers the group before him. Kairoshuu shinobi, three of them appearing on behalf of their new chief, who has by the way not returned a single letter of Gau’s except for a one-line missive: ‘I have nothing to say to a traitor.’

So why is he reaching out now? Gau would like to know, and Raikou tends to follow his lead on these things so here he, Gau, and Raimei are, sitting at the table in that order with Gau’s hand over Raikou’s knee. Isao and Shiki wait for them on the first floor in case things get hairy.

After introductions, nobody speaks until Raikou finally says, “To what do we owe this pleasure?” Raikou’s hands are on the tabletop instead of by the sword at his side, like Raimei’s hands. The man on the left, old enough to be their father, stares at him and Raikou gives him an amicable smile.

The leader slides a tray bearing cups and a bottle of sake over to them. “We’ve come to toast you. Our chief has officially decided to recognize the legitimacy of the Shimizu clan.”

Gau wants to point out that they never asked for said recognition, but instead he nods and pours a drink for them, then Raikou, then himself. Propriety dictates Raimei is still underage. When Gau goes to drink after their toast, Raikou’s elbow suddenly comes up and knocks the cup out of Gau’s hands, spilling sake down the front of his shirt.

“Raikou!” he says.

“Oh dear, I apologize,” he says without looking at Gau, making a big deal out of how he was ‘only’ adjusting Shirogamon at his side. “Are you alright?”

Gau reads the behavior instantly (they’ve been married in spirit far too long for him to not be able to) and frowns when Raikou doesn’t hesitate to drink his own cup. “Fine, thank you,” he says, words weighted by the knowledge of what Raikou fears.

The sake doesn’t seem to be poisoned, as the others drink heartily themselves. Gau doesn’t pour himself a new drink. The room is quiet and still awkward while he feels Raimei shift in her seat beside him and the old man continues to stare at Raikou, impassive.

“We also came to ask you a favor. Some information you might have about the Fuuma—”

“I collect information, I don’t share it,” Gau says, interrupting Raikou who’s opened his mouth to answer. “We don’t involve ourselves in the internal politics of the Nabari world.”

“We—”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Raikou says with his normal placid smile, and Gau sees that Raikou is looking at the old man at the far end, eyes fixed on a gun he was pulling from his holster. “I would be very unhappy if any harm came to them,” he says, inclining his head towards Gau and Raimei. “And attacking the Shimizu clan right after you’ve claimed to accept us would leave a bad taste in your allies’ mouths.”

“I don’t accept you,” the old man says, putting his gun on the table. “I don’t respect you. I respected your mother.” In the potent silence that follows, he lights a cigarette and takes a drag before going on, growing bolder in his vituperation. “You’re an insult to her memory.”

“Hey!” Raimei says.

Gau tries to stand but halfway through the motion he’s yanked down by the back of his shirt, landing hard in his seat. Looking at Raikou, he sees his smile hasn’t wavered, though now he wields it like a sword. When he sets his cup down the force of it cracks the bottom, sake pooling out around it on the table. “My, you have strong opinions about me!” He twists the fabric of Gau’s shirt in his hand, like he’s holding on to him and warning him all at once. His knuckles dig into Gau’s spine. Gau reaches for his knee and holds it. “But our conviction speaks for itself.”

“Not when your leader is without honor,” the old man drawls, but finally, with a grunt, falls silent when scolded.

Raimei stands, tearing into him, and he rolls his eyes through her speech. Angry at the disrespect, she goes harder, until her brother stands and starts pulling her away by the arm.

“Enough,” he says sternly to her.

“Raikou!” she says as if that’s protest enough, and in her mouth it is.

“Raimei,” he says as he pushes her through the door; she holds on to the frame until he pries her off, yelling over her shoulder that the old man knows nothing of honor.

The three left behind look to Gau. Gau shakes his head and gets up, shoving his chair back in. “If you want a relationship with us, tell your chief to write to me. I’m easy to find.”

In the hallway, the Shimizu siblings are arguing, Raimei louder than her brother that he can’t just take that.

“I can’t waste my energy being offended by every gibe, Raimei.” He looks her up and down. “Don’t undermine me by getting angry on my behalf.”

“Undermine you? I was defending you!”

“I defend myself.”

‘No,’ Gau thinks as he watches Raikou’s face settle back into the same, self-denying smile. How Gau has learned to hate that smile. ‘You don’t.’

**

At home, Raikou does his best to close the bedroom door gently when he feels like slamming it just to hit something. But can’t worry others, no. Must be respectable, must be the leader.

Gau follows him inside of course, asking words that sound like static, and frowning when Raikou covers his ears. Gau starts talking louder and still it makes no sense, no sense to him at all. Gau approaches, reaching out, and Raikou plants his hands on his shoulders and straightens his arms, rigid, holding Gau at a distance and looking at him from behind the hair that’s fallen around his face.

‘Will you just _leave me_?’ he thinks.

He sees the other’s face change, sliding from concern to frustration, something he never fixes on Raikou, and then to his surprise Gau, with great effort, removes Raikou’s hands and pushes his arms back towards him, pinning his hands to his chest. Raikou is too surprised to push back.

“No,” Gau says simply. He releases Raikou and lets his own arms fall to his sides, looking just as vulnerable. He opens his mouth, but averts his eyes and shakes his head. Raikou at first fears his disappointment, but is both surprised and relieved when Gau steps forward and encircles his neck, pressing his body weight against Raikou to ground him.

When Raikou tries to kiss Gau’s neck, he turns his head away. “That’s not what you need right now.”

But he does; he doesn’t belong in his body, feels himself drifting far away, and needs those hands, ever reaching for him, to reel him back in. He presses one hand against the other’s lower back, feeling the hard line of his hip press against his.

“I don’t want to,” Gau says and he’s released immediately. “I’ll lie down with you, though.”

In bed he holds on to Gau like a comfort object, head against his chest and hand in his hair. They’re still in dayclothes with the comforter pulled up almost over their heads. He doesn’t think he sleeps but still he wakes up bleary, sweaty. Gau is still there, watching him with alert eyes, touching his cheek. 

“Remember how much we need you,” Gau says, holding Raikou’s face between his hands.

His heart is still beating too fast, but he says, “I’ll try.”

**

Otherwise, being married is an absolute dream. Raimei teases Gau that he finds every single opportunity to work ‘My husband’ into conversation, from the transactional exchanges at the grocer to companionable talks with Shiki and Isao, who definitely know he is married.

“You’re making it hard to take you seriously,” she says as they’re gardening one afternoon. The plants are her followers; she’s put a lot of work and time into them and they flower and reach skyward at her command. She snips off some dead growth and looks at Gau with a teasing expression.

“What’s wrong with being excited?”

“You two are gross is all,” she says.

“Oh, you wouldn’t say that if you had somebody,” he jokes, and notices the way her shoulders inch up towards her ears, face indecisive before she schools it as best as Raimei can, which is to say not well at all. He remembers how much time she’s spent traveling recently, and how cagey she’s been about what, exactly, she’s doing.

Oh. Ohhhhhhh.

Raimei, seeing she’s been found out, glowers and says in an undertone, “Don’t you dare tell Raikou.”

“I won’t,” he says, knowing that if Raikou figures out he knew and didn’t tell him he’ll get it later, but, well, he has his ways of calming Raikou down. “Why, do you think he’ll be unhappy?”

“Because he’s my brother,” she groans. “I don’t want him thinking about me like that.”

Gau did make a joke once about Raikou waiting on her hypothetical date with a sword ready and Raikou had looked at him like he was crazy and said with confusion, “Raimei could beat anyone who disrespected her within an inch of their life. I have no need to be so overprotective.”

They return to their plants. Gau debates respecting her privacy before his curiosity wins out and he says, “So what’s he like?”

Raimei smiles despite her earlier embarrassment and hiding. “His name is—well, I’ll wait. He’s from Fuuma and he sucks at kendo. I started off trying to recruit him and then...we just spent more time together.” She clutches her face. “Never mind, this is too embarrassing.”

“I was starting to worry about you.” Gau remembers the night they still lived out of a tent and he walked outside to find Raimei crying, the person it was over obvious. Aizawa had broken her heart for a long, long time. Raikou said to respect her privacy, so Gau had.

She snorts. “Not everyone needs a partner to be happy, Gau.”

Gau honestly can’t relate; he cannot imagine living his life without Raikou, hasn’t been able to since he was thirteen and staring at Raikou in quiet awe. They were so _young_ , he sees now, but still they donned the Wakachi bracelets and then ran away from it all, determined to fight the entire world if they had to for what they believed to be right. In a way it had been incredibly romantic. And even more foolish.

“You do,” he says, continuing to tease her and she scoffs and punches his shoulder.

**

“You are so boring since you got married,” Yukimi bemoans, swirling his beer around in his glass. They’re sharing a pitcher and have drained half of it already. They haven’t seen each other since the wedding and the mood of the night is calm but companionable.

Raikou carefully peels apart his yakitori, popping it in his mouth bit-by-bit to Yukimi’s disgust. “Why?”

“‘Gau won’t like me being out so late,’” he mocks. “Do you do anything without his approval now?”

“I do,” Raikou says, getting defensive but only mildly so. Yukimi doesn’t have to understand; it’s his marriage.

“Where is Tenpa anyway?”

“He said, ‘I’d rather stick my finger down my throat than see that guy,’ so.”

Yukimi ponders this before saying, “Normally he’s more articulate.”

“I agree.” He told Gau that he wouldn’t be intruding if he came, but he suspects Gau likes Raikou maintaining his own friendships. Gau has his entire network of penpals; Raikou has done his share of socializing with them, sitting there while Gau and his contact chat amiably. Gau is so cute when he’s charming others. Raikou likes watching him, sometimes so much that he forgets his own talking points. Gau will squeeze his knee underneath the table and Raikou will forget everything then, wishing they were at home. (One time they got Very carried away and ended up having sex in a closet, Gau’s legs around his waist and moaning into his shoulder, biting down to muffle any noise. He likes rendering Gau speechless.)

“How’s it been? Marriage, I mean.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“Shut it,” Yukimi says, playfully shoving him by the head.

Raikou pushes some hair behind his ear. “Wonderful,” he says honestly.

“Gag me.”

“I mean it. It feels like it was a long time coming.”

“You’re telling me,” Yukimi says, taking another sip of his beer. “What did I tell you? Where’s my ‘Thanks, Yukimi?’”

Raikou laughs. “Thank you, senpai.” Letting the conversation die for a moment, he thinks that he never feels the need to fill the silence with Yukimi around. The man is content with just Raikou’s company. Raikou always appreciated that, even when he felt he had nothing to give anyone, Yukimi never asked for more than Raikou’s self.

The izakaya bustles around them, Raikou watching a server walk by them carrying a plate of grilled meat. She’s wearing a very chic chunky bracelet and he debates stopping her to ask where she bought it.

“Your hair looks nice,” Yukimi offers.

Raikou touches the ends of his hair, down past his collarbones now. Gau loves to run his fingers through it and though it always makes Raikou want to cringe he allows it because it makes his husband happy. “Do you think it would look nice if it were blue?”

“Pink is really more your color.” Yukimi sips his beer before saying, “What’s Mr. Head of the Family planning lately?” He always says Raikou’s title like he finds it amusing, because he knew him when he was still a child.

Raikou describes their work with Gau’s words. He has his own ideas—followers and a school and a lifetime of leadership ahead—but he feels silly when he tries to put them into words, like he’s foolish for hoping. So he doesn’t share his own ideas often.

_”You’re an insult to her memory.”_

Raikou grips his glass with cold hands and takes a long drink.

Yukimi sets his beer down and taps him on the shoulder. “Question: Why do you look so morose when you talk about your family?”

Raikou blinks. “I do?”

“Well you’ll never catch me with that look on my face when I talk about Kazuho.” Yukimi claps him on the back so hard a bit of his beer sloshes out of his glass, almost too hard to be friendly. “There are worse things in life than being surrounded by people who love you.”

“Are you saying that you love me, senpai?”

“Ugh, Gau would annoy me to death if I did.” He picks his beer back up. “Not that it’s my business, but just something I’ve noticed. Nobody said you _had_ to be so hard on yourself, Raikou. You’re making up for it, yeah?”

Raikou thinks about that all the way home, as he often has to after Yukimi has dispensed unsolicited but spot-on advice. He feels run through and very seen. Gau and Raimei of course would tell him the same thing, so Yukimi can’t be wrong, but… No, he thinks, shaking his head, their bias in Raikou’s favor doesn’t mean they should be dismissed.

When he opens his bedroom door he finds Gau embroiled in some type of research, old notebooks (he saves all of them, stored chronologically, and gets very annoyed if Raikou leaves them out of order after reading them) and print books surrounding him. “Did you have fun?” he asks without looking up from his book.

“Yes.” Raikou sinks to his hands and knees and crawls over the books and paper towards Gau. He presses a kiss to Gau’s neck. Gau tilts his head up to make room but does not let go of his book. He’s well aware that one part of Raikou does not work when he’s been drinking so this will go nowhere. “Gau?”

Gau hears something in his tone and holds the back of his head, holding his face to his shoulder. “Raikou.” ‘Out with it,’ it says.

He can always trust Gau, he thinks, to tell him the truth no matter what Raikou feels about it. Delivered with love, maybe, but honest all the same. “Do you think I’m atoning?”

Gau is quiet for a moment before he sighs, “What did Yukimi-san say now?” He can never fault Yukimi for it, though.

“He said that I’m too hard on myself.”

“Well, we tell you that all the time,” Gau says, voice gentle and concerned. He strokes Raikou’s hair, fingers detangling the ends. “Raikou, I don’t think you ever had anything to atone for. Maybe for hurting Raimei, but she forgave you a long time ago.” He starts to rub between Raikou’s shoulder blades. “I’ll say it as many times as you have to hear it: yes, you’ve done your penance. You deserve the good things in your life.”

Raikou hugs his waist, feeling that Gau is a bit thinner than he’d like. He worries that Gau is working too hard again; times have been lean, it’s true, but that’s no reason to overwork himself. But if he tries to change the subject right now, Gau will only get cross. “Thank you.” He once heard that rather than saying, ‘I’m sorry’ for asking for validation, one should instead say, ‘Thank you’ when they receive it. Maybe Yukimi told him that too. “But what does give me the right—”

“Raikou,” Gau warns, hand carding his hair more assertively now. “I don’t love people who abandon their duties, or who would expect me to. And I love you. What does that mean?”

“That you’re a hypocrite—we abandoned Kairoshuu,” he jokes, voice thin.

“No, we just had a bigger duty to the world.” Gau rests his cheek against the top of Raikou’s head. “That’s how I like to remember it.”

Raikou closes his eyes. 

Gau urges him to get changed and go to sleep; Raikou only does the former. He lies awake in bed until he’s sure Gau is asleep. Then he goes outside. The night air is still warm but he hugs himself as he walks, bare feet in the dirt and hair loose. He ends up where he usually does: before the memorial.

Raikou stares down the memorial, thinking hard. It mocks him with the name of every single Shimizu family member he either cut down or was cut down due to his betrayal. He doesn’t deserve it, but here he is, the leader of the clan he destroyed. One who is without honor, one who once threw his name and life away. He narrows his eyes and pushes his hair out of his face.

“I am done begging ghosts for their approval,” he whispers, feeling eyes upon him that he doesn’t want to hide from.

Gau is right as ever.

Raikou’s duty is to the world. To the living.

**

While taking inventory in the back of the store in which he works, Gau sings to himself, almost a murmur, “ _Together forever, you and me right? I’ll be by your side._ ” At first he doesn’t know why, until he remembers, shocked he almost forgot: today is Mom’s birthday. She would sing this to him when he was a little boy. Raising his voice as he hauls a box, he sings, “ _From the heart, I believe in these feelings. I want to take care of you._ ”

Raikou notices he gets sad on this day and usually tries to offer him pleasant distractions or a listening ear. Gau talks about Mom if Raikou asks, but, as if sensing Gau prefers to keep his memories of her to himself, he doesn’t ask often. That does explain why Raikou was so cuddly this morning though.

“You have a nice voice, Shimizu-san,” a woman says behind him.

Gau at first doesn’t realize that his boss is talking to him. There’s a half-second of ‘But my name is Meguro,’ before he remembers. He does miss his surname; it was his only memento of Mom. Even though what replaced it is a token of his new family, of his heart, he still misses it. He’ll never tell Raikou.

She and he talk about how the day went while he was alone in the store, and before he knows it they’ve talked away the last fifteen minutes of his shift. He heads out, still humming the tune as he steps out into the sunlight.

He likes where his family lives well enough, though he does miss the city they came from. He’s lost in thoughts of Mom and what he’ll bake himself today in honor of her birthday when he first notices a presence behind him. He walks down a street, turns left, turns left again, and is sure he’s being followed when he turns around and waves. “Hello there.” He adjusts his bag at his side as two people approach him. “I’m going to guess you’re from Kairoshuu, right?”

The first seems puzzled by his calm reaction; the second confirms. 

“And I think if you wanted to kidnap or kill me, you would have when I was alone in the shop. So what do you hope to accomplish today?”

“We have an invitation for you, and only you.”

He thinks of Raikou, who is going to shake him if he finds out Gau was so cavalier about his own safety. He thinks of how the Nabari world never cared about his safety.

“I’m listening.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gau is singing (what I think are) the Japanese lyrics to “Good Company” from Oliver and Company because that is one of the cutest mental images I have ever had. Gau’s “I can’t love someone who would abandon their duty” bit is inspired by a much better-written exchange from the book _Wolfcry_ by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. I am aware ending this chapter here is maddening and that is why I did it, thank you.


End file.
